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Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

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Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#101

Post by tuatoru »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #52

I've lived in Berlin for fifteen years now. My view is very different from what this article is portraying. Germany definitely has issues. Some of them are short term issues. Some of them self inflicted. And others have been issues for a long time. But all of these are fixable. All it takes is change. Change is hard for Germans but if you look at their history, you see that that wasn't always the case. They are hard…

You missed the demographic situation. 1.5 children per woman[1] is below the number required to maintain a population. Germany has very clearly failed to invest enough in integrating immigrants and making them productive.

In terms of population, infrastructure, capital plant and equipment, and institutions, Germany has been eating its seed corn for decades.

Edit: the same applies to national security, as Germany's ineffectual support for Ukraine shows.

1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#102

Post by tuatoru »

sneed_chucker wrote: post #81
iforgotpassword wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any traditional industry/company in Germany approaching "computers", "the web", "smart something" doesn't want to pay properly for devs. Mostly because the leadership in their late 50s (at best) has some nephew who is "good with computers" so it can't be that hard. You get senior electrical engineers laying down some bonkers architecture for how the software side is gonna work, and then two BSc CS graduates thrown at…

Yeah it's not just computers. Germany is full of educated high IQ people working for, in my opinion, peanuts. But software and technology is especially poorly compensated there.

If grandparent's example is representative, German education is not teaching people what they actually need to know. The ssh stuff you can get in five minutes' reading of the man page.

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#103

Post by teleforce »

It's interesting to note that a GWM Tank 300 that cost 1/5 or 1/10 of Mercedes G-Wagon price (depending on the countries) is as good if not better in term of interior luxury, moving from A to B and off-road capability [1]. It now has reached its 300K milestone production recently, and fast becoming Corolla of 4WD world.

[1]Cybertank 300 Is A Batshit Crazy $47K Chinese SUV With 227 HP:

https://carnewschina.com/2021/08/17/cybertank-300-crazy-47-0...

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#104

Post by nothercastle »

teleforce wrote: post #103

It's interesting to note that a GWM Tank 300 that cost 1/5 or 1/10 of Mercedes G-Wagon price (depending on the countries) is as good if not better in term of interior luxury, moving from A to B and off-road capability [1]. It now has reached its 300K milestone production recently, and fast becoming Corolla of 4WD world. [1]Cybertank 300 Is A Batshit Crazy $47K Chinese SUV With 227 HP: https://carnewschina.com/2021/08…

Zero safety features?

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#105

Post by snapplebobapple »

nradov wrote: post #92
snapplebobapple wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally point two and three of the argument I made in the second half of the first paragraph as something that is incorrect to bet on continuing forever. What would your project spread have looked like 20 years ago? I am guessing quite a lot worse. What will the spread look like in 20 years? I would bet on it being closer than it is now.

Most Middle Eastern countries have made approximately zero progress on worker training and productivity in the past 20 years. Some have even gone backwards. There's no reason to expect they will do better in the next 20. It's a sad waste of human potential due to toxic politics and unfavorable geography.

If progress was equal everywhere we wouldn't have all these laggards willing to work for peanuts to improve their life (because the peanuts they were working for locally are even smaller than foreign peanuts). ~5% of the population currently not getting the job done doesn't invalidate any part of my argument. It just means that 5% might be the last guys left in the dark ages if progress continues and the policy of offshoring doesn't reverse (either for political reasons or because we cracked the full automation code and labor costs no longer matter because we aren't using much labor to produce things. If that happens the dirty stuff will still be offshored but the calculus will be different for the foreign country).

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#106

Post by _heimdall »

catdog wrote: post #98
_heimdall wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that prices haven't increased noticeably sure seems like a sign that sanctions against Russia were largely toothless and their oil is making its way into the global supply all the same. Russia is responsible for something like 12% of all global crude oil. If sanctions actually worked and global demand for oil went unchanged prices would have increased, likely quite a bit as the demand is very sticky and not…

> The fact that prices haven't increased noticeably sure seems like a sign that sanctions against Russia were largely toothless and their oil is making its way into the global supply all the same. It was never the goal to keep Russia from selling its oil as it would hike up prices globally. The goal was to force them to sell it for cheap so they barely make any profit. That at least worked somewhat.

That would have worked for a short time while Russia and the oil industry adjusted, but ultimately its a global market of a fungible commodity.

Unless sanctions succeed at blocking Russian oil from hitting the market entirely a loss in profit would be short lived at best.

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#107

Post by _heimdall »

The_Colonel wrote: post #82
_heimdall wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that prices haven't increased noticeably sure seems like a sign that sanctions against Russia were largely toothless and their oil is making its way into the global supply all the same. Russia is responsible for something like 12% of all global crude oil. If sanctions actually worked and global demand for oil went unchanged prices would have increased, likely quite a bit as the demand is very sticky and not…

Sorry, but you don't understand the western sanctions on Russian oil. The goal is to keep it flowing (so that the prices don't explode), but to squeeze the Russian profits. Make their (e. g. transportation) costs high and sale price low (price cap).

Sanctions cut off markets from Russian oil, they didn't attack profits directly. Sure there will be a short term hit to profit margins as the oil industry had to adjust and different markets have to buy up the sanctioned oil, but its a global market of a fungible commodity.

Even if sanctions did somehow target profits directly, has it worked? Do we know that Russian oil profits are meaningfully less than they would otherwise have been? And how do we balance that benefit with the damage caused to European markets that had to scramble to adapt?

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#108

Post by eqvinox »

Aloisius wrote: post #90
pgeorgi wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP / (average annual labor hours * number of people working in some way)? GDP is a pretty rough metric for efficiency, but it's among the better ones that are collected somewhat uniformly. "average hours worked * number of people working" is an approximation of total of person-hours worked (approx. because both numbers are probably cleaned up a bit in incompatible ways) The result would be the value a person in the…

No need to approximate anything ourselves, GDP per hour worked is a standard indicator of productivity. Germany is slightly behind the US. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/gdp-per-hour-worked/... Of course, efficiency can mean things beyond productivity.

The fact that Ireland leads this one is a strong hint at this also being not very useful: it's distorted by shell corporations and the likes. Ireland is the tax haven of choice for the entire EU in terms of digital services.

Is there a "GDP of only the industrial sector"?

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#109

Post by _jahh »

jijijijij wrote: post #57
jackcosgrove wrote: post #19

Germany's strategy has been to offer higher quality products at a huge markup. Just using the auto industry as an example, in the past twenty years the difference in quality between a mass market vehicle and a luxury vehicle has compressed. Competing on quality seems to be getting harder. The Anglophone economies, whose shift to services away from manufacturing has been ballyhooed and decried in many quarters, embrac…

Disclaimer: I don't know shit, about anything. > The Anglophone strategy led to greater internal inequality but seems to be better from an aggregate standpoint. Let's see. I feel like whatever is brewing economically and socially may hurt the "service industry backed societies" harder, when the time has come. > Germany still has an enviable roster of small, agile manufacturers, and the Bundesbank and others reject th…

the second bank crisis in two years makes me think maybe you do know something. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-08/multi-fam...>

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#110

Post by latency-guy2 »

polotics wrote: post #97
intalentive wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German workers are famously productive. Non-German substitutes are unlikely to be so industrious.

Can you substantiate this statement?

What is the profile of the average migrant coming into Germany compared to the average German?

The standard need only be more/less educated or qualified, unless Germany wants to remove regulations.

I of course think Germans are not really "productive" in the first place, from what I've seen they only work about 80% as much as Americans do, and output is not necessarily exemplary for time spent (or saved if you will). Americans put in more, and you get out more, and their pay also exceeds top XX percentile for overseas counterparts.

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