[mattmanser]

I always get a bit conflicted with Marc Andreessen stuff.

Like this article starts out with a bold claim that's...wrong.

Germany have done well. A western country has done well. Elephant in the room, massive 80 million person country, major western power, and the American claims no-one's done a good job because the US hasn't.

And then he goes into talking about having pre-prepared therapies or a vaccine. Again, we already have to an extent. You can't make a vaccine before the virus exists, but you can have a way of rapidly making one. We do have pre-prepared vaccines, like this one:

http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-03-27-oxford-covid-19-vaccine-...

Perhaps, again, he's just talking about the US?

[xal10]

Perhaps the medical system works better in Germany than in the U.S., but the rest of the article's points stand:

- Rents are sky high, and the landowners and people in power have no intention of changing that. In fact, they import more people at any opportunity in order to increase the size of the industrial reserve army and push up rents.

- Germany has no substantial capacity of manufacturing simple goods like masks.

- While Germany still has manufacturing, the middle and lower classes are exploited and relatively poor.

But people get what they vote for.

[intended]

This is news to me that the German middle and Lower classes are relatively poor.

Who is this in comparison to?

Could you share where you got this info?

[simonsarris]

I think its a very big mistake to attempt to quantify quality of life with the numbers below but I could see how someone could try to make the case that Germany is relatively poor vs the USA:

Germans are taxed much higher than people in the US: A tax rate of 42% on income over 57K euros, vs 22% in the US (and the US bracket tops out at 37% for 500K USD). Gross national income is lower, 54K in Germany vs vs 63K for USA (though still quite good). Other sites peg Germany as 82% the purchasing power of the US, though less cost of living. Yet many durable goods are much more expensive in Germany. Cars are ~28% more expensive, gas is more expensive, electronics are more expensive: iPad in the US costs $800 vs $950 in Germany. Utilities are 56% more expensive in Germany, clothing 40% more expensive.

Some stats: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Germany/Un...

[mattm]

I also thought this as well reading the introduction. Canada has less than 1/2 the number of cases and deaths on a per capita basis than the US so they are doing twice as well as the US in handling this.