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by JauntyHatAngle
1837 days ago
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I think you may have misunderstood my post somewhat. But to respond directly to you, a stereotype typecasting an entire country to lazy is damaging and not particularly useful unless you want to insult someone. However handwaving away trends in cultures as a stereotype can also result in missing important facets, e.g. Burn out in Japanese work culture. Are Germans more "efficient"? Idk, let's look at some data and try to nut out whether it checks out. If it is, would be nice to know what aspects make it so. Though it's usually not simple. |
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My guess is that because there are all sorts of limits on how much people can work (there are lots of holidays here) so the industries that tend to survive are those that are highly automated, and have high productivity per worker.
My feeling is that productivity-per-worker is essentially a political choice. Low skill, low automation labour is inherently unproductive, but it's also flexible and it doesn't require any strategic direction from the state. High skill high automation jobs are very productive, but they are brittle - if the market moves, all that skill and tooling becomes worthless.
The German (also Japanese) approach isn't all sunshine and rainbows, though. In Germany, for example, a pack of ten paracetamol costs like four euros. That's about a 100x markup from what paracetamol actually costs. This is because in Germany, pharmacies are protected from competition, to preserve the sector. The same is true of taxis, for example.