[lispm]

There is still the East/West divide. Less jobs and lower payment in the East. Then there is a larger sector with low-paid jobs and lots of people from East Germany and Central/East Europe competing. The EU rights makes it easy for EU-citizens to look for jobs in Germany.

Mostly everybody with medium- or high qualifications should have no problems finding a well-paid job. Across all ages. In the western parts of Germany...

[agumonkey]

I've recently read that the east still hasn't recovered from the pre reunification lag... crazy.

[usrusr]

Has southern Italy ever recovered from not being the north? Has the American Midwest recovered from not being one of the coasts? Economies naturally concentrate and countering that takes not only effort and dedication but also wise decisions and luck. West Germany used to be very good at this, but concentration to a few major cities has been accelerating recently. It's not only eastern Germany that is being left behind, the weaker regions of the former west are suffering from the same draw.

[adventured]

> Has the American Midwest recovered from not being one of the coasts?

That's not a great reference point. It only works well if you're only talking about New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

California's GDP per capita is only about 8%-10% higher than Nebraska. Iowa is as high as Oregon. Illinois is 30% higher than Florida. Indiana is higher than Vermont. Wisconsin is higher than North Carolina. Minnesota is close to Maryland. South Dakota is higher than New Jersey or Virginia. Kansas is 20% higher than Maine. Missouri is higher than South Carolina. Ohio is on par with Rhode Island.

The US mid-west is an economic juggernaut compared to the rest of the world. It's larger than the economies of France or the UK, and nearly as big as Germany. Averaged out it's very comparable to the coastal states.

[usrusr]

> California's GDP per capita is only about 8%-10% higher than Nebraska. [..]

But how are populations developing? When people follow the money, GDP per capita evens out, maybe to the point of overcompensation given enough mobility and optimism to "make it there". Just look at how real estate prices are not matching the distribution of GDP per capita at all: real estate is less mobile than people.

(Edit: and yes, there surely are also some economic hotspots within the Midwest, some of those states are huge and have plenty of room to have their own internal concentration patterns)

Back to real estate, which brings us back to Germany, where rising real estate prices (both owned and rented) have increasingly been on people's minds recently: the solution cannot be just rent regulation or construction deregulation, it has to go to the root, find was to Conner concentration, to make the backwaters more economically viable, where housing prices ar not rising but in free fall.

[agumonkey]

I see, quite interesting.

[lispm]

I don't think that's crazy. The GDR economy was dismantled after the war by the soviets quite a bit more than in the west. Then it had a socialist style economy for several decades, then with the reunification, the economy collapsed. Lots of industry went away because it was not competitive and based on old technology or for various other reasons. East Germany is near to countries which are even poorer. The young people moved to the west to work there. This creates all kinds of structural disadvantages which will be hard to overcome in 50 years.