Part of the German economic success story has been keeping housing cheap, so they can keep pay down, so they can export. As soon as housing prices rise, pay rises, and the story falls apart.
...and the secret sauce of keeping rents down have been conscious efforts at keeping second and third tier cities and towns attractive for business, which distributed demand and thus kept it somewhat in check in the naturally attractive metropolitan areas. E.g. most of those small, highly specialized industry (car and other) suppliers that are the backbone of the German industry are based in cities you never heard of, that's not a coincidence but the result of careful balancing.
In recent years (decades, actually), we seem to have dropped the ball in the counter-centralisation game, maybe as a consequence of reunification.
> Part of the German economic success story has been keeping housing cheap, so they can keep pay down, so they can export. As soon as housing prices rise, pay rises, and the story falls apart.
The only reason they're able to do this is because of years of fairly extreme mercantilistic policies combined with struggling economies in other parts of the EU (Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and to an extent Ireland).
It works out for Germany in the short- and medium-run, but it's bad for the EU as a whole.
It's also bad for Germany in the long run, because even if extreme mercantilism were sustainable in a free market in the long run (spoiler: it's not), excess surplus means, by definition, that the government is underinvesting in public infrastructure. It takes a while for the effects of that to become evident, but Germany is starting to see hints of it already, and if these policies continue, it'll become much more pronounced.
Not so sure about that.
Germany doesn't compete on firesale prices for its export products.
Germany is amongst the top 5 richest countries whatever that means.
I simply see many good and skilled workers paid way too little. How am I earning as much as a med tech with 12 years experience after being in IT proper for 2 years ?
The answer lays, admitted within my limited view, in the skilled labor force simply accepting middling pays. Which is maybe harder to pull off in the IT branch it attracting more workers not ready to simply accept lower pays for their work.
In the end I have colleagues with way more experience than me earning less than me simply because they asked for less...Somehow its more a kind of established cultural thing and companies / management taking good advantage of it. Lets not pretend C levels are badly paid in Germany XD.
In recent years (decades, actually), we seem to have dropped the ball in the counter-centralisation game, maybe as a consequence of reunification.