Why germany is kicking our ass.

[xoxoxoBruce]

What country has the highest exports in the world today? It’s the country with the highest wage rates and union restrictions. Germany has become more of a power, not less of a power as the world has become more global. Our problem isn’t competing with China, it’s competing with Germany in China. We’re so focused on China all the time, and low-wage assembly stuff, that we’re missing what’s going on. It’s Germany that’s going in and selling stuff in China that we ought to be selling that would hold down the trade gap between the U.S. and China. It’s not China’s fault; it’s Germany’s. But no one wants to talk about that. Because that would raise questions about the whole U.S. model: Why is this high-wage country beating us? Why are the European socialists beating us? It’s too subversive an idea so we don’t allow in the discourse.

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[casimendocina]

Damn Germany!

[Undertoad]

I understand they did not do a stimulus package and their unemployment rate is 8%.

[glatt]

It's been a long time since I lived in Germany and saw what they were doing first hand, but one thing that really struck me was that they have actual vocational training at a young age. A significant portion of their population goes into blue collar work, but there is no real stigma attached to it and the money is pretty good. They actually train them so that they excel at what they are doing. In my US high school in Maine, I'd guess that 75% of the kids in the vocational programs were there because they were slackers, not because they had any sort of mechanical aptitude.

Today, in my county, there is no real vocational program for Middle School and High School kids. There are a couple of courses here and there, but no program. Where are the welders of tomorrow going to come from?

[Undertoad]

That's how it was in my high school too. The idea that the trades are for losers is so completely wrong. They should be highly respected.

This is a major unnoticed failure of our fucking school systems.

This all coincides nicely with David Brooks in the NYTimes today:

Then there’s the middle class. The emergence of a service economy created a large population of junior and midlevel office workers. These white-collar workers absorbed their lifestyle standards from the Huxtable family of “The Cosby Show,” not the Kramden family of “The Honeymooners.” As these information workers tried to build lifestyles that fit their station, consumption and debt levels soared. The trade deficit exploded. The economy adjusted to meet their demand — underinvesting in manufacturing and tradable goods and overinvesting in retail and housing.

These office workers did not want their children regressing back to the working class, so you saw an explosion of communications majors and a shortage of high-skill technical workers. One of the perversities of this recession is that as the unemployment rate has risen, the job vacancy rate has risen, too. Manufacturing firms can’t find skilled machinists. Narayana Kocherlakota of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank calculates that if we had a normal match between the skills workers possess and the skills employers require, then the unemployment rate would be 6.5 percent, not 9.6 percent.

There are several factors contributing to this mismatch (people are finding it hard to sell their homes and move to new opportunities), but one problem is that we have too many mortgage brokers and not enough mechanics.

[xoxoxoBruce]

No vocational training here either. We wouldn't want to hurt their self esteem, by teaching them a trade where the could make a living, instead of becoming an English major, working at Burger King to pay their huge student loans.

We don't need welders, glatt. Cheap stuff comes from China, expensive stuff comes from Germany, and we just let our infrastructure fall apart.

[Griff]

Nah, we don't need people who know materials.

[classicman]

We've had a pretty good Vo-tech program at our high school for about a decade or so. The stigma attached to it at first was expected, but now it's pretty much nothing.

[Scriveyn]

Nice idea

But srsly, don't believe everything that's written in a book.

Some of these statements are plausible, some out of date or wrong.

Just a few remarks:

childcare - for pre-school children was at very high standards in former East Germany, less so in the western part. Currently attempts are made to improve the availability to around 30%

free university tuition - Germany being a federal system, some of its states (social democrat governed) have free university tuition, other (conservatives) have introduced fees over the past 5 years or so.

six weeks of federally mandated vacation - while mandated vacation is around 4 weeks (I think), it is true that almost every employee has six weeks

nursing care - a mandatory insurance has been introduced some years ago, to pay for old age nursing. This will however be not be enough to cover the costs - outcome open.

health care - people are allowed to "opt out" of the public health insurance plan and get private insurance instead (obviously this will be the wealthy). Also civil servants get special perks. - The system is exploited by the pharmacy industry. Germany's prices for medication are the highest in Europe. The same drugs cost much less in neighbouring countries.

Günther Horzetzky - never was labor minister, he was a high-ranking official in that ministry though.

-oOo-

A point in case, though it may not necessarily be taken as the rule:

I have found, in my very personal experience, that efficiency is much higher in Germany and that "lower ranks" of employees in the US are discouraged from taking even the minutest initiative or responsibility, probably due to inflationary threats of legal action.

A company I am familiar with, the German segment of an American company, made huge profits even though employees were slacking it for 5 out of 8 hours a day, still running circles around and subsidising the ailing American mother. Eventually the whole company (American + international segments) was bought by an investment company, and given to the sister of one of its directors as a toy. Result: the American part went chapter 11 bankrupt and is now owned by the banks. Little sister is still at the helm.

Just my

[wolf]

Once again, we are screwed by our own post-war reparations. Darn those Nips and Huns and their efficiency.

[Juniper]

Among many other things she wants, my 14 year old daughter wants to move to Germany. Or at least visit for a long time. And she's making pretty decent inroads on learning the language.

I'd say another reason Germany kicks our ass, which applies to lost of other countries as well, is that most of their people speak more than just German.

Contrast that with the U.S. where people act as though their heads are going to explode should they have to "press 1 for English."

Sayonara! Ciao! Gezundheit!

[xoxoxoBruce]

I believe he chose Germany because they are supposed to be the most successful European state, viewed by wall street and the industrial world. There may be other countries that best them in the categories mentioned, but somehow they have managed to perform, despite a pro-labor government and strong unions. Here the unions get blamed for dragging companies and the country down. If the company/union relationship wasn't so adversarial, they could work together for the benefit of both.

For cradle to grave care, I think the Scandinavian countries come out on top.

[skysidhe]

We should probably start handing out ticker numbers for the countries that kick our ass.

wanna kick our ass? take a number. next!

[piercehawkeye45]

I had a conversation about this with my roommate the other day. My friend agreed that the expectation to go to college has created a social stigma against manual labor jobs. Most people with a college degree will not "lower" themselves to that type of work even though those jobs can pay much better than most jobs that "require" college degrees. This has caused a shortage in those fields and part of the problem mentioned in articles above.

What my friend added, something I didn't think of, is that the expectation to go to college actually is hurting the economy. More and more people are spending the first five to ten years of their lives paying back college loans with a job that probably doesn't even use their degree instead of spending it on other things that could help the economy.

Funny thing is, both my roommate and I are engineers and there is a very good chance both our younger brothers, both going to a two year college, will get paid more than us. Yet, there is a stigma against their jobs...

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

Most people with a college degree will not "lower" themselves to that type of work even though those jobs can pay much better than most jobs that "require" college degrees.

Doesn't matter, they don't have the skills to do those jobs. There seems to be a pervasive idea you only have to show up and be willing, to earn good money... not so. Yeah, yeah, I know your Cousin Louie's neighbor's friend is making $100k right out of high school. His father or father-in-law own the business, or he's doing something illegal. Decent money is not in labor, it's in skilled trades. Electricians, plumbers, machinists, CNC operators, etc, need a tremendous amount of knowledge to do their job properly. The schools have closed, and the apprentice system has all but dried up, largely a result of the jobs being exported.