There are federal elections in September in Germany. CDU just fell behind the Green Party in recent polls and SPD (whose Olaf Scholz ultimatively was in charge of BaFin) is a shadow of it's former self anyway. I do not think the everything will turn for the better, but I am hopeful that some actions will be taken. The political style of Merkel - and Germany as a whole for that matter - of a steady hand and waiting for consensus to form to go with, will hopefully be ammended by some visionary ideas.
I feel the German inferiority complex described in the article. I think it is partly built on a misunderstanding: Silicon Valley was not funded by smart engineers thinking in their garages. It was funded by massive military grants. The garages came later. Last time Germany gave out massive military grants it was sadly very able to compete technologically. Everyone knows, who worked on the rockets that ultimatively won the space race.
German universities are indeed world-class. It's not like uneducated people can export this much. The university rankings do not take into account that research in Germany happens at Fraunhofer or Max Planck, which are door to door to their respective university and have shared staff. If all their papers would be taken into account, the rankings would change dramatically.
Germany is capable and cold start investing massively. I think the article exactly gets it: We are just too comfortable. Acting like a big Switzerland might not be glorious but in the end I take a socially relatively cohesive country, where an illness or going to university will not bankrupt you, where your kids can travel alone in public transportation, where police shootings per year are single digits, where the air is very breathable and the tap water is drinkable over world leadership any time.
We can always pump some billions into football or another sport once in a while and watch the nation win the world cup, if we really need to dominate something for no good reason, which is an obvious connection to national pride, the article missed out on.
>I take a socially relatively cohesive country, where an illness or going to university will not bankrupt you, where your kids can travel alone in public transportation, where police shootings per year are single digits, where the air is very breathable and the tap water is drinkable over world leadership any time
You're obviously entitled to your oppinion, but can we please stop pushing this cherry picked cliché narrative of "US bad because healthcare, shootings and tap water."? That's like saying Europe suffers from mass terrorist attacks and sexual assaults on young women.
>We can always pump some billions into football or another sport once in a while and watch the nation win the world cup, if we really need to dominate something for no good reason
Why not pump some billions in local unskilled wages and stricter enforcement of regulations so that foreign workers won't have to get exploited by unscrupulous German businesses?[1] That would be for an actual good reason IMHO.
> Fine, but can we please stop pushing this cherry picked cliche narrative of "US bad because healthcare, shootings and tap water."?
Are you saying those aren't issues?
Because I've lived in the US, and know many Europeans that have lived there or traveled there on holidays, and pretty much all of them agree that:
- the first time in their lives they were afraid of getting ill was when they started living in the US
- they were all astonished at the amount of homeless people living in tents in the downtowns of all major cities (here if a major city has like ~10 people sleeping outside in winter, that's bad, but the US is just shockingly bad)
- the first time in their lives they were afraid of getting killed was in the US (e.g. interacting with the cops, walking through some neighborhoods) because people were carelessly carrying guns outside (there are guns in Europe, some countries like Switzerland have a ton of guns, but the way people manage guns in public, and that includes police, is radically different)
- they were all astonished and the amount of fat people, and how fat they were. What people consider "fat" in Europe would probably be "normal" or maybe even "thin" in the US. You don't find in Europe people that are so fat that don't fit through the door of a bus.
These are not narratives, these are facts that every European that lives or has lived in the US will happily tell you about.
The US style of living is great if you have money, but Europeans measure their style of living by how the poorest people in their country live, not the richest people.
By those measures, the US is an outrageous place for pretty much all European standards.
> That's like saying Europe suffers from mass terrorist attacks and sexual assaults on young women.
Do you think that's a made up narrative? Because everyone I know in Europe agrees that this is true, that these are horrible issues to have, and that these issues need fixing.
Your argument that "the US has no issues because Europe has issues" is typically known as "whataboutism".
Don't be a "whataboutist". It doesn't help fix neither Europe's nor USA's issues.
Europe's "mass terrorist attacks" are so much less frequent than US mass shootings that they would barely register.
The sexual assault issue seems to have been a couple of big nasty incidents, which were heavily spun by media personalities whose main line of business was talking up the threat of Islam. How big a problem this really is is hard to tell, especially since nightlife has been cancelled for fourteen months.
> The sexual assault issue seems to have been a couple of big nasty incidents, which were heavily spun by media personalities whose main line of business was talking up the threat of Islam.
Sorry, but that's nonsense. In Rotherham or Cologne, the opposite was true: the media was actively working on covering it up, not "heavily spinning it" to talk up some threat.
Just because they happen less frequently (which I don't know if this is the case) does not mean that they are not an issue.
I don't know how the situation is in the US about these things, but if these problems do not exist there at all, its normal for Americans coming here and seeing it happen "occasionally" to freak out about it.
The GP is not saying they aren't issues, just that they don't add much value to the conversation. It's especially clear in how it triggered your response... and in how you've mostly overlooked those same problems in Europe (with the minor nod on violence). I'm an American and European (yes, two passports) who has lived in three different major cities in the US, two in Europe in separate countries, and I've traveled extensively in both areas. Let me offer some counterpoints:
On healthcare, I've had to sit for 2-3 hours in an emergency room in London with my throat mostly closed struggling to breath because I hadn't turned blue yet (no kidding), which put me behind the people with stab wounds. That's a normal ordering of priority when there aren't any doctors available, but it was mostly because I was on a six-month waiting list to see an allergy specialist and hadn't yet been diagnosed. At least in the US, your only fear about getting sick is because you're worried about the cost. I had a xenophobic doctor (said I was just coming to the UK for the healthcare, hah, even though I was working and paying taxes) prescribe me medication I was allergic to despite saying over the course of several visits that I was. Luckily I looked up the medication before taking it.
As to homeless people, sure, there may be less in the cities (though still there), but in exchange you have shanty towns and cities setup on the outskirts like with Cañada Real outside of Madrid, or Christiania in Copenhagen. I've seen smaller ones in France (Nice and Paris), though at least one of them was removed, and know of short-lived ones (on the order of months and years) in London. On both sides of the pond you have people trying to make things better, like Utah's experiments or those of Helsinki.
As to violence, Europe is a dangerous place. If the people you've spoken to were afraid for the first time in their lives, that's mostly because people grow accustomed to their own brands of violence. I was about an hour away from being blown to bits in the 2004 Madrid bombings, I was lucky enough to have decided not to bring my family to the Promenade des Anglais in Nice the day the terrorist decided to drive his truck through the crowds, and I've experienced the terror that is walking through the streets of London at night during an uptick in knifings (never attacked myself, though a colleague was and escaped).
We can talk about the abduction of children like Madeleine McCann, or the acid attacks on people like Katie Piper. We can talk about the shootings in Northern Ireland, or the annexation of Crimea, but instead you should just look at the Wikipedia page on European terrorism, even though it's only one type of the violence you can encounter.
As to obesity in Europe: Yes, the USA is on top, though there are variations by city (and people trying to fix it), but I have seen people too fat to board a bus (and no, not Americans) in both England and France, at the least. Don't believe me? Look for pictures of Virginie Grossat, French (!) model size 54 (though I've never seen her in public, just ordinary people).
But what about your claim that Europeans measure their style of living by how the poorest people in their country live? What does that say when you look how the Syrian refugees were treated in Europe? Maybe they're discounted because they weren't citizens? Well then, how about how the Polish are treated in the UK and Ireland, or ex-colonial immigrants in France? What about eastern Europeans in general, or the Romani people?
None of this is meant to say that America is just great, or Europe just sucks (I happen to be very fond of both). Why do you think so many people emigrate to the US? What the grandparent was trying to say is that when creating this caricatured version of the US (or any place that happens to be "other"), then you end up engaging in the very thing you're decrying, "whataboutism", and you actually blind yourself to the reality.
>Your argument that "the US has no issues because Europe has issues" is typically known as "whataboutism".
Sorry, but wasn't grandparent's (u/allendoerfer) original post the one that started the whataboutism? I was just contradicting him with a mirrored whataboutism to prove why his way of thinking is wrong? Why are you only cherry picking mine?
The topic was regarding one of Germany's failure, and Grandparent (u/allendoerfer) posted something along the lines of "at least in Germany we have have breathable air and drinkable water unlike Americans who get shot instead".
What does that have to do with the Wirecard situation and how is that anything else but severe offtopic whataboutism?
>Europeans measure their style of living by how the poorest people in their country live, not the richest people.
No they don't, otherwise, the wealth-gap between rich and poor wouldn't be at an all-time high in Germany/Europe [1][2].
I wasn't even (only) refering to the US. I was trying to bring accross, that it's quite nice to live in Germany and that it does not need to be dominant or proud of anything as a nation. I was trying to list benefits Germans take as a given, but are actually not available everywhere in the world (which has almost 200 countries btw, not only US + Germany). As far as I know, US also has breathable air and is somewhat save in most places. It's just that the unsafest place in Germany is probably still safer than almost everywhere else in the world. The basics are okay in Germany and they matter, even if you don't think about them day to day. If you want more, go on and build it, nobody forbids you to do so. Society just provides a nice baseline and even tries to catch you, in case you fall.
> Sorry, but wasn't grandparent's original post the one that started the whataboutism? I was just contradicting him with a mirrored whataboutism to prove why his way of thinking is wrong? Why are you only cherry picking mine?
The OP is making a trade-offs. They are arguing that they prefer the value proposition of living in Europe than that of living in the US. They don't seem to weight the downs of Europe or the pro's of the US much, so they are not mentioning them, which is IMO fair.
We can argue about these pros and cons, whether they missed some, whether we weight them differently, etc.
What I don't think is very helpful is just a straight "whataboutism" answer.
You, me, and the OP are all different. What's a good value proposition for the OP might be bad for you and me. That's ok. It does not make the OP "wrong".
> Fine, but can we please stop pushing this cherry picked cliche narrative of "US bad because healthcare, shootings and tap water."?
Well those are the reasons, why I would not want to live there, even though I recognize it's economical superiority. Actually mostly the freedom of children. The other things you can solve with money. But your kids will have way more freedom in Germany and there is nothing money can do about it in the US.
As a German, I have to say, you're very well summarizing the current state of affairs and my own impressions. Very realistic and matter of fact - very German ;)
The US is not a role model for Germany by any standards. But of course it can very well serve as a source of inspiration just like many other cultures and countries. Sadly, precisely this is a weakness of current policitcal elite.
It's painful how deliberately they are ignoring advances in drug legislation f.x.. We have many innovative projects just around the corner (Portugal, Switzerland, Netherlands to name some). Instead policitcal affairs are driven by dogmatism and ignorance. And that's precisely the reason for many issues regarding digitalization as well.
> German universities are indeed world-class. It's not like uneducated people can export this much.
We export modern versions of the same motors we did for decades. Took one south african immigrant to overthrow our car companies plans for years.
> The university rankings do not take into account that research in Germany happens at Fraunhofer or Max Planck, which are door to door to their respective university and have shared staff. If all their papers would be taken into account, the rankings would change dramatically.
Quality over quantity. The bullshit those institutes publish regularly is laughable at best.
The country you is describe doesn't exist anymore. Germany failed to invest in education, now that there is a pandemic it gets crystal clear: we slept through 30 years of innovation and progress and looking at the current talking points in Berlin I am afraid we are still asleep at the wheel.
I think you are massively overestimating the rest of the world. The perfectionism shown in your comment is exactly why the world (correctly or incorrectly) trusts German products.
I did not make any claim about the rest of the world. And the fact that you try to dodge the substance of the argument and instead try to talk trash about other nations shows everything wrong in the western world, but especially Germany.
So many wishful thinking. I bet there will be no changes after election. Why should it be? Germany will continue slowly declining with whole Europe. This pandemic management was/is real shitshow.
The universities are other funny thing. They have no future with heavily underpaid staff and work contracts for 6-12 month working contracts. Max Planck and Fraunhofer are sweatshops for industrial partners. They do the tasks for industry at 40% costs, again 1 year contracts and sad salary.
I don’t want to start about general technical level in Germany. I want to cry when I think about coming relocation and registering whole family in another city. Plus car. Plus another school. It’s all filing tens of pages and using snail mail or showing up in person. Or using fax machine as a modern solution.
Oh come on, there is amazing progress in Germany on digitalisation and hi-tech. The government of Upper Frankonia is now switching from 4-digit fax numbers to 5-digit fax numbers!
>If what's currently happening to Germany (uninterrupted boom since > 10 years) is decline, then let there be more of it.
If by boom you mean the boom of big business profits that don't trickle down to the workers, boom of wealth inequality, asset prices, property prices and rents then yes, but that's nothing to be proud of.
Average wages of workers in Germany have not kept up with this boom but cost of living has risen.
Average real wages in the last ten years have steadily increased after being stagnant before. Inequality is lower in Germany than in China or the US.
I am not argueing that Germany is some kind of utopia. I am just saying: Find a better place to live. It will not be one of the dominant countries. It will be Switzerland etc.
Agreed that it is not too bad in Germany, but the trend is pointing in the wrong direction. It is unclear whether there are political parties that have a reasonable response to the current challenges - some are complacent about it, and some go a bit overboard (Die Linke advocates a wealth tax of 5% a year for wealth above EUR 1m).
Real estate prices tripled or even quadrupled during last 10 years while salaries haven’t changed a lot. The rents in the cities are not really affordable anymore. Look at the problems in Berlin when the city tried to control the rental prices and failed.
Compare Berlin rents to any European capital. Man, reading all those replies, Germans do live in a bubble and do not know how privileged they are. Take a step back, look at London, realize how good you have it, just rent an apartment instead of buying one, put your money in the stock market and wait for the population to decline and the bubble to burst.
The difficult part in renting is compiling the documentation and to get accepted as a tenant. The dividend and capital gains taxes of 26.4% efficiently cool down unexperienced individual investors. The last 10 years have basically invalidated the possibility of buying housing for any individual on employment contract. Before anything will pop within next 10 years, German boomers will be chocking the remaining population even with their last death throes (while the elites holding the industry will be only consolidating their influence). ie. "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, young, and sane".
Just resorting to whataboutism at every step doesn't magically make rents in Germany cheaper more easy to obtain for those in Germany.
The fact that Parisians or Londoners or Tokyans(is that even a word?) have expensive rents doesn't help me when I live in Germany since they're completely different markets and I only compete in my local market, not with those in Paris/London/Tokyo.
If german administration is a shit-show then administration is a shit-show everywhere. There are always people who will say "the 'administration' should know better!!!".
People have too high standards for leaders. They are also human.
First wave went well (probably in good part to dumb luck, but also because stuff just got done and less arguing about it), this made people somewhat complacent, second and third wave has been a shitshow of not wanting to be unpopular by locking things down and thus ignoring predictions, do last-minute changes when it's too late, apologizing for getting it wrong just to immediately repeat the same pattern, keeping things in an unstable and unsustainable situation for the past few months with no long-term planning (which also means the options are worse, because options that would have required long-term preparing aren't available and the available ones are badly thought out). Picking of random "target points" without apparent consideration what those actually mean outside of being some number that was compromised on and thus is now the benchmark. Way too much political manouvering with politicians pushing for "a common approach", agreeing with everyone on one, loudly announcing it, going back to their state and doing something entirely different. This dragged-out state with constant (but in many ways meaningless for many peoples experience) changes just drags on everyone while at the same time doing a bad job at keeping covid at bay.
EDIT: Random examples: lockdown laws that fail trivial legal challenges because they were made up last minute. Almost religious clinging to the belief that kids in school aren't a relevant factor (to the point of states suppressing evidence to the contrary) which lead to too little investment into teaching infrastructure and options, making each switch between kids in schools and not unnecessary last minute and painful to implement. Unnecessarily messy signup/notification processes for vaccinations (who would have thought one might need a plan to vaccinate people at some point...). Late adjustment of financial help schemes. Nonsensical and inefficient schemes to e.g. distribute masks.
Good question. At the beginning of the pandemic, the government response was excellent (with Angela Merkel, who has a doctorate in quantum chemistry, promoting fact-based policies).
[Quick background: Germany has a political system not entirely unlike the US with a federal level and "Länder" = state level. Health (along with police, education, etc.) is delegated to the Länder.]
Towards the end of 2020, two things happened:
People developed "Coronamüdigkeit" (being sick of the restrictions), and in the run-up to the federal election in Sept 2021 (with Merkel stepping down), several prime ministers of the Länder tried to gain a higher profile (with an eye on the Bundeskanzler election later) by opening up. So, squabbling and inconsistent policy ensued, with a massive third wave happening right now.
Throw in corruption (several CDU politicians had to step down because of shady mask deals), the delayed vaccination drive, etc., and "shitshow" seems appropriate.
>People developed "Coronamüdigkeit" (being sick of the restrictions)
People developed sickness of restrictions because the restrictions were not tight enough to completely stop the spread, but tight enough to become annoying when dragged along for so many months (a year?).
So this half-assed restriction policy were we're kind of, sort of, locked down, but not really, got people annoyed.
The problem is, even if you want to tighten the measures now to wipe out the virus, you can't, because people are already burned out from the previous half-assed measures trat dragged on for so long.
> Do you mean they have the vaccine but can't give it to people? I thought we did not secure enough of them.
All of the above. Finally they are just giving it to doctors and now numbers are finally ramping up. Leave us some drinks at the opening party, Germany will be a few months late.
Simple example. Quick test on Thursday 2 weeks ago before school. Whole class negative, cool! A call on Friday from school: we have 2 positive cases, please don’t come next week. Why all the quick tests!? They bring nothing.
> Germany will continue slowly declining with whole Europe.
I agree and this is really sad. Thinking of migrating because I plan to have a family and want them to grow up in the best environment. Which countries you guys think will be the best bet?
Europe will be a safer option than most others. Everywhere else will be a backwards step in terms of safety and education of your children. The US might seem like a better option for now with higher wages, but with the increase in the gap between rich and poor, how sure are you that your children will be on the rich side of that gap?
If you are a person of colour, even more reason to avoid the US. Not that Europe is perfect, but your chances of being shot by the police drop dramatically.
The highroading by Europeans regarding race never ceases to amaze me. I've never experienced more overt racism than during my limited time in Europe (specifically Germany, Netherlands, and Denmark).
The real difference here is American issues are broadcasted more than European ones are.
Switzerland, maybe Norway, maybe Iceland. Singapore? New Zealand or Australia? You must decide. Nordic countries are too cold for me. Swiss salaries for engineers weren’t that different from my German salary. The others too far. I settled down between Munich and Alps. I love nature and still can reach Munich in 40 minutes if needed.
> Swiss salaries for engineers weren’t that different from my German salary.
Don't you (and your company) pay way more taxes in Germany than in Switzerland?
I've never applied to Munich positions but everything I've read point to a significant gap between Zürich and Munich in software engineering, even before taxes. But maybe that's only valid for software engineering and not so relevant for other engineering fields?
I am an electrical engineer. My offers in Switzerland were ~120k CHF. I didn’t look at Zurich because of the crazy rental prices. My C# colleague got 160k CHF proposal in Zurich , that sounds okayish. But he wasn’t convinced seeing kindergarten cost of 3000 CHF monthly.
New Zealand and Australia aren't good choices. Rich and poor gap is growing faster than ever, legislation is regressing, housing and living costs are going up - wages are stagnating.
What you just said literally applies to every European(world?) country.
There is no single country here where wages have increased faster than real-estate/cost of living and where the rich aren't getting richer while everyone else is stagnating at best.
It's a side effect of globalization and our current version of capitalism supported by (intentional) poorly designed economic policies that enable this wealth gap to grow ever larger.
I disagree, Overall I find that Germany really strikes a good balance. Nice social security net, nice salaries, very low criminality, free school and universities, nice public transport. What else do you need to have a family? Real estate is indeed a bit on the expensive side, but it is the same situation everywhere else.
Yes you feel a decline because of the aging population and low business growth. I agree that a developing country will be more vibrant and you will feel more alive, but you will have to deal with a shit tons of other issues that are non existant in Germany.
I agree with you that these points are currently good. But my question is whether it will look the same in 20 years' time. At the moment, I think that Germany lacks vision and is trying to achieve improvements through bans rather than concrete measures. In the countryside, public transport is still very poorly developed, but on the other hand, services like Uber or other forms of shared taxis are banned or given little support.
Don't get me wrong: I am happy with my situation in the last few years, but I fear that future generations will no longer have such a situation due to a lack of vision and wrong measures.
I know a few people who've emigrated to Germany (from Ireland) precisely because it's good for kids (in particular, it has a good childcare situation AIUI; despite generally lower tech sector wages than Ireland people doing this can afford to have more kids due to subsidised childcare and cheaper housing).
I'm inclined to agree with the opinion upthread that Germany is maybe a bit overly negative about itself. :)
Germany has their share of scandals.. Volkswagen, Deutsche Bank, Sparkasse, other banks.. Wirecard.. but politicians of course had no idea.. afterwards they are all shocked and surprised.. sigh.
Especially Wirecard.. is such a failure on so many levels. Lead me to the conclusion: 90% of people half ass everything. It's like "The Wire" all the way. I bet you even Google, Apple and Facebook half ass stuff.. it's just a facade of elitism at those places.. Places like EY. Being a consultant, I've worked at several such places.. it's 100% true. (but to be fair they also had their share of brillant people)
So many people are pretending their way throughout their whole careers. While basically being incompetent.. or not giving a damn.. sigh.
don't forget the big infrastructure project like BER which entertained me a lot.
A story I like particularly is the Phantom of Heilbronn (related to another big scandal: the NSU) which I think explain what is happening: Germans have a great confidence in them and other germans. They are very suspicious when something comes from outside Germany / Austria (like France, Italy, or UK), but if it is german it must be good and seriously done!
Truth is, Germany also has a share of slackers and fraudsters doing half assed stuff, but they admit their failures and sins only when it has become overwhelming, leading to crazy scandals.
I still remember my colleagues who were proud of VW when the dieselgate came out. They were completely shocked. VW did this! They were expecting this from the sleazy french and italian, but not from their own beloved german company.
I'd argue that Germans don't do it half-assed, but they do worry about the irrelevant details, over-complicate things and try to shift responsibility as much as possible.
It's true that they tend to miss the big picture, but their attention to details is their strength. In my line of work we take german stuff because they took care of the annoying little details that competitors just ignored.
On the other side when they finally accept to take responsibility over something, you can count on them to do the job! Unfortunately you already lost months negotiating it, you would have been better off doing it yourself.
I had heard about the Wirecard scandal, but didn’t know the details. Having read the article now, I do wonder how Ernst & Young signed off on Wirecard’s accounts.
Of course a lot of people half-ass stuff at FAANGs, they're only human (plus there's been enough scandals coming out of those places that it's no secret any more).
What got me about German business, as a Kiwi working with Germans, was a few things:
1) How cosy everyone in a given sphere is with each other
2) The nearly inevitable strip-club and coke in relationship building
3) The prevalence of kick-backs in contracts, although obviously euphemistically renamed.
4) How Germans accepted corruption as part of life
5) How they were proud that their corruption still got things built, unlike, say, the Italians
Now I don't really have much experience outside of these two countries, so maybe this is the norm around the world. But shit.
My DE parent company turned up on Muddy Water's[1] short list because of interesting share assignments, (paying above average for acquisitions) and unusual interactions with related entities. And I'm really not surprised.
And I really struggled to not use the word cosy repeatedly in this, because it was applicable to much of it, and really sums up Germany's informal corruption as I've experienced it.
Not that I claim NZ is any better, but here slight corruption doesn't feel like an accepted norm.
I think NZ is far better off than most other nations, we consistently rank 1st or 2nd as the least corrupt country on earth [0] (I am also a kiwi living in Germany :) ). Also anecdotally I cannot think of a single corruption scandal on par with anything here in DE or even across the Tasman.
I never experienced corruption in Germany, people have always been very honest. However I don't navigate in the business sphere.
I did notice strange things which suggest corruption, like constantly rebuilding perfect roads, every time by the same companies but of course I got no proof.
The German anti-English sentiment is sometimes right. They're not afraid to point out omnipresent Anglosphere oligopolies - in payments (Visa, Mastercard), in social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn), in surveillance (Google, Facebook), in mobile (Google, Apple). While the rest of the Europe entirely submits to these oligopolies on a promise of receiving "investment". Funny though how Germans turn blind eye on their own oligopolies dominating and devastating European markets.
Part of the problem is that German economy is ruled by industrial and media moguls. For them internet is whether "stupid websites", a medium serving copyrights violations, or legal compliance issue (see "Impressum" hysteria). Either way an issue rather than opportunity. With their geriatric population the strategy is basically - increase public media fee, 50mbit copper internet in every household, internet for broadcasting public media content while throttling any alternatives.
> Funny though how Germans turn blind eye on their own oligopolies dominating and devastating European markets.
Everybody wants sellers to compete when they're buying, nobody wants to compete when they're selling.
> For them internet is whether "stupid websites", a medium serving copyrights violations, or legal compliance issue (see "Impressum" hysteria).
The large corporations and media companies had issues with the laws around imprints? That wasn't my perception at all. Rather, it was average people who wrote blogs etc who didn't want to put their real name, home address and tax IDs onto their sites for various reasons, but the law was so vague that nobody was sure their site wasn't "similar to the press" or "with commercial interest". Larger companies didn't care at all -- they were generally compliant way before that law was introduced.
> Larger companies didn't care at all -- they were generally compliant way before that law was introduced.
If you write anything on the internet you're publishing content, ie. media might start consider you a competition, certainly after achieving certain visibility. Why not create an easy way to shot someone down or to suck someone into an expensive time consuming legal swamp?
Oh, I misunderstood your comment, I believe. I took it to mean that the companies got into a craze about new requirements, not that they were welcoming the new requirements as it gave them some/more control over online publishing (which is how I understand your comment now, please correct me if I'm wrong).
I generally agree in that case, they were probably happy for that moat.
I don't know if it's intentional separation of powers. The American culture is very individualistic, especially compared to the German. This just naturally means that American companies tend to "go it alone" in relation to the public sector for longer than they would in Germany.
Certainly when American companies get to the right size they seem to become much closer to the political bodies that matter to them and their interests, as is the case likely everywhere
>The American culture is very individualistic, especially compared to the German.
I wouldn't rush to this conclusion. US billionaires usually run many charity funds whereas German billionaires rarely do anything like that.
Also, German businesses owners don't seem to mind exploiting people's health and the environment (VW emissions scandal) or foreign workers [1] if it makes them money, so I think the same issues that plague capitalism in the US (greed) affect Germany too.
Otherwise, the wealth gap between rich and poor wouldn't be rising so steeply in Germany [2][3] if they wouldn't be so individualistic.
You can generalize that: German government doesn't mind exploiting people's health and the environment, and prioritizes industry interests. Two current examples: the ongoing ignorance about ground water pollution [1], and the Diesel air pollution affair, which is far from being over [2].
- this isn't the authoritative article on the origins of the wirecard scandal that the title would have you believe. It would be nice to read such an article but this isn't it.
- BaFin, the German regulator has historically been the one to trust but failed to verify. This to a large extent because they didn't have the budget or the staff to do their work properly, traits it shares with many other regulators around the world.
- Another problem is that regulators tend to have a two-way revolving door with the industry they are supposed to regulate. It is pretty rare to see a regulator that really takes such an industry to task.
- Finally, and more worrisome: Europe and the United States have both stopped being hungry. Yes, SV gives the USA a headstart for now, but keep in mind that SV is a spin-off of the MIC, and that without that MIC SV would have not existed as a phenomenon. The 'silicon' in silicon valley doesn't point to servers or hardware but to a much more basic element: the transistor, which displaced the vacuum tube. Back in the vacuum tube days electronics factories were much more wide-spread across the globe than they are today, the tech was much simpler and as a consequence the entry level was a lot lower. Once a country could make glass making vacuum tubes was a relatively small step away.
The distance between making glass and making modern chips is 50 years of investment in technology, a time horizon only very few regimes operate at, and usually those happen to be the plan-economies.
So for everybody else the doors are now firmly closed. Europe is on the backfoot, within another 50 years or so I expect the United States to be on the backfoot too.
Scandals like Wirecard are less rooted in the cycles of ascendancy of the tech world (though as a 'darling' Wirecard got away with more than they should have been able to) than they are in the simple fact that regulators are not operating independent of the industries they regulate.
> - Another problem is that regulators tend to have a two-way revolving door with the industry they are supposed to regulate. It is pretty rare to see a regulator that really takes such an industry to task.
Though the article specifically claims that this rarely happens in Germany, with the boundary between the political and commercial sphere being less porous than elsewhere.
Check out the current leadership of BaFin and other EU regulators and check their track record, and where they typically end up afterwards. The lower ranks hardly matter.
If the EU wants to solve this they actually have a head start on other regions, they could investigate each others' industries. I'm sure the French would love to regulate the Germans and vice versa!
Well, I don't think this article does a good job at explaining the scandal. It seems to me the author had a thesis and is mostly occupied with explaining that. What makes wirecard interesting are all these connections with politicians, oligarchs, secret services etc. Some day in the not so distant future, somebody will make a tv series out of this.
> I don't think this article does a good job at explaining the scandal.
I think that's because of their use of "origin". Both the title here and that of the article ("The Weird, Extremely German Origins of the Wirecard Scandal") can be taken two ways:
1. How the Wirecard scandal transpired
I think this is what you took it to mean. Where "origin" means the beginnings of the scandal itself. Much like saying "the origins of my success" when talking about my business career.
2. The environment that led to the Wirecard scandal being possible
I believe this is what the author actually sets out to do. In this the article didn't really look at the scandal itself, but rather the atmosphere -or place and time- from which Wirecard could have come happened in. This would be like saying "my origins" when describing that my family came from Wales.
I agree that there are more salacious details that the author didn't really touch on (particularly concerning Marsalek), but I think the author's embedding of the scandal in the political and economic fabric of post-war Germany was quite well done.
Because it's not an article about the wirecard scandal. It just uses it as one large example of scandals in Germany and why they happens on a social level.
I had rather Germany stay in the global small league the way it is than be seduced by perceived anglo-saxon economic success and turn into some crappy copy of the US. The US truly scares me.
I think the article touches on a broader problem with European approach to finance, innovation, and competition in the globalized economy (to be clear, I say that as a European). It is hard for anyone living here not to notice that the continent is slowly falling behind and becoming more provincial in many ways. This leads to some defensive and delusional attitudes, often presented on this forum ("we may underperform economically but that's okay because quality of life here is better and we don't have all the shootings and inequality" or "it is better to have stable low growth than excessive speculation-driven growth"). This mentality is especially striking when applied to the field of finance - which is associated with greedy ruthless US-style capitalism. There is a certain pride in the fact that financial markets in Europe are fragmented, over-regulated and underdeveloped. Nobody seems to recognize that despite all their flaws US markets are much more transparent and less corrupt. I have participated in discussions where people debated Gamestop saga, concluding that thankfully in Europe it would not be possible because we "protect retail investors" here and don't allow payment for order flow. The fact that European retail investors get a terrible deal, with inflated costs to access the market, lack of choice, and mediocre returns, did not seem to bother anybody. Almost everyone I know prefers to invest in US stocks, through US brokers with local subsidiaries. The precious few recent attractive European companies that I know of all got listed in New York. Wirecard case really is symptomatic. To run a global innovative business in Europe you cannot cut corners and bend the rules Uber-style; EU regulations "protect" us from that kind of enterpreneur. The only way is for the business to be an outright fraud.
> When scandal happens, the country seems less interested in figuring out who exactly did what than in letting the old reflexes of collective guilt kick in.
Ha. True.
What a great read. Thanks for sharing.
> A scandal like Wirecard is powered by the dream that you could have an Uber without slashing workers’ protection—that one could hold on to what remains of the German social market economy while at the same time going all-in on laissez-faire capitalism.
;_; let us dream and stop holding up a mirror in front of us.
I feel the German inferiority complex described in the article. I think it is partly built on a misunderstanding: Silicon Valley was not funded by smart engineers thinking in their garages. It was funded by massive military grants. The garages came later. Last time Germany gave out massive military grants it was sadly very able to compete technologically. Everyone knows, who worked on the rockets that ultimatively won the space race.
German universities are indeed world-class. It's not like uneducated people can export this much. The university rankings do not take into account that research in Germany happens at Fraunhofer or Max Planck, which are door to door to their respective university and have shared staff. If all their papers would be taken into account, the rankings would change dramatically.
Germany is capable and cold start investing massively. I think the article exactly gets it: We are just too comfortable. Acting like a big Switzerland might not be glorious but in the end I take a socially relatively cohesive country, where an illness or going to university will not bankrupt you, where your kids can travel alone in public transportation, where police shootings per year are single digits, where the air is very breathable and the tap water is drinkable over world leadership any time.
We can always pump some billions into football or another sport once in a while and watch the nation win the world cup, if we really need to dominate something for no good reason, which is an obvious connection to national pride, the article missed out on.