When businesses are fleeing, you're doing something very wrong.
I think the combination of capital and skilled labour fleeing is very concerning and a trend that could end up self-reinforcing and hard to stop.
A place where I could blend in which rules out the kind of obvious and otherwise excellent choices in Asia.
Germany is still the 3rd biggest economy worldwide. If you want to stay in Europe (as per your other comment) and future economic improvement is your biggest concern, I don't see a benefit in moving anywhere else.
We don't have AI in Europe (don't get me started about Mistral) but we have AI regulation.
In 2011 Germany had 17 active nuclear power plants. They closed their last one in 2023.
There is some confusion here: the issue is not necessarily about pure electrical power alone. You need oil and oil based products for most of the things (plastics, fabrics etc.).
Unpopular opinion these days, but yes. A government's duty is first and foremost to its citizens. Anyone else comes last.
As USA is the main destination for IPO, wouldn't many German companies naturally leave?
Also once you are successful you can afford to pay the costs to arrange the companies affairs in a tax efficient manner e.g. utilise low tax regions with the EU such as Luxembourg and wider world.
Why do you think that might be? Perhaps the Germans could make their IPOs more business friendly, so they have no reason to flee.
Many companies will float in New York but also have secondary listings in their home country.
If they created a single EU wide stock market it would compete much better.
This will cost for a while and then work again.
Nope, it's thanks to loosing competitiveness in some key sectors.
Trump and Putin are the convenient scapegoats but it's not Trump and Putin's fault the Xiaomi SU7 is faster and cheaper than a Porsche. It's not Trump and Putin's fault that Germany doesn't have a strong software/service industry. Germany's lack of innovation in new tech is finally catching up with them. Also Trump and Putin didn't force Germany to tie it's economy to Russian gas and invest in copper Internet instead of fiber, that was Schröder, a German. Trump was actually warning Germany about this being a risk and they laughed in his face. Who's laughing now?
Germany's economy is built on outdated businesses models around selling expensively manufactured niche products by expensive unionized workers protected by paperwork and bureaucracy that don't work in 2020s anymore when US owns the software industry and China, Korea and Taiwan the hardware industry who aren't bogged down by unions.
They've been outcompeted and now are looking for outsider to blame for their own short sighted mistakes where they chased a quick buck at all cost at the expense of the future.
That's why working class people are angry and feel broke despite the constant "line goes up" narrative.
They were shocked at how easy it was.
I'm not terribly familiar with the business environment in Germany, but I hear things like it's really hard to fire someone.
This kind of rethorical question is annoying. If you have an opinion, state it.
> Perhaps the Germans could make their IPOs more business friendly
The main reason companies tend to get listed in the US (or, in the case of many large existing companies, to get listed there on top of their existing listing in their home country) is that the US stock market is the largest in the world, and listing there means easier access to more would-be buyers, and therefore better market capitalization.
I suspect your advice to German policymakers wasn't "somehow make Frankfurt the largest trading place in the world", but that's litterally what it would take.
My opinion is obvious. Not as business friendly as the US. Make Germany a more attractive place for business than the US.
So when you get money out of this, you pay your fair share of taxes, like everyone.
Empirically that seems to be false, given the number of successful businesses created in Europe in the past couple decades is way way less than in the US or China, even though Europe has better infrastructure, education and public healthcare.
Could you tell me on what data you are basing this argument on? I see this sentiment pop up in every related conversation but haven't seen the source of these claims. Could you help me out?
Germany has Europe’s lowest share of entrepreneurs to workforce. So i guess the infrastructure, education and healthcare are not really factors.
> So when you get money out of this, you pay your fair share of taxes, like everyone.
this is already happening. people are paying their taxes. but Germany wants more than it’s fair.
cherry on top: Germany has been in recession for… 3 years now?
no?
Businesses are also fleeing California, New York, etc., because of high taxes.
It's also worth pointing out that many of those "wonderful things" had to be regulated by governments due to how bad their business practices and environmental effects are when pursuing making money. Sure, we have cars, but that's coming from the same industry that brought us leaded fuel and global warming.
The “Robber barons” is a phrase that have been used since the late 19th century, and the fact that the American economy had become toxically concentrated in the hands of a few back then really isn't something contentious.
Edit out swipes like this from comments on HN please, no matter what you're referring to.
Of the “home truths”, of course people can disagree and debate them, but we should ask ourselves what we know that they don't know before dismissing them out of hand.
All that aside, we still don't call people we disagree with trolls on HN; that's a term reserved for consistently-bad actors who should be banned.
Besides, I've listed several times a number of other networks that sprang up. If it wasn't Arpanet, one of the others would have become dominant. The reason is simple - anyone with two or more computers tried to connect them together. The notion that we'd still not have any interconnections between them if it wasn't for Arpanet is just silly.
As for bad environmental effects, socialism has a much worse track record. Free markets produce enough surplus that costly mitigations become practical.
Claining that the internet evolved from telegraph is very much bad faith, but the worse part about this argument is that it's wrong: the first country-scale telegraph network was indeed funded by the French government[1].
> As for bad environmental effects, socialism has a much worse track record
Why are you guys obsessed so much with socialism? There is no mention of socialism anywhere in this thread. Government funding stuff has nothing to do with socialism in the first place, otherwise it would mean that every developed country is a socialist one, with the only non-socialist countries being failed states like Somalia which really isn't the argument you want to make.
> Free markets produce enough surplus that costly mitigations become practical.
“Free market” doesn't exist, it's a propaganda phrase with no basis on reality. The government always and everywhere has a key role to play in the economy, by counteracting all kinds of negative outcomes that arise from markets (mitigating crashes or maintaining consumer trust through regulations to name a few).