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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

#71

Post by euroderf »

nwellnhof wrote: post #70
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…

> They are hard workers Where does this cliché come from? Germans work less than any other country on the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

To paraphrase Stalin, "Quality has a quantity all its own."

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

#72

Post by somewhereoutth »

mamonster wrote: post #68
jillesvangurp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Dutch. Just look across the border at what will happen. We're having lots of fun with our dearly beloved Geert Wilders trying to get a government together and having to suddenly deal with the notion that 100% percent of his party program is a combination of impractical, impossible, or in conflict with the constitution, international treaties, and what his own voters actually want. Which of course is a hot topic o…

I would agree with you but there is a key difference in Germany: CDU/SPD boomers will never defuse the AfD by letting them into power because they don't think like that. They will use all the tools at their disposal (Bundesverfassungschutz, punishing secessionists like Maassen, etc) to prevent AfD from ever getting into government, which will only make them more powerful. You might have a different idea of AfD's stra…

> CDU/SPD could easily let them into government

But that is precisely what happened in 1933 - the conservatives thought they could control Hitler and his party, but of course it didn't turn out that way. Small wonder they won't be doing the same for AfD anytime soon.

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

#73

Post by JKCalhoun »

snapplebobapple wrote: post #62
JKCalhoun wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that we need to keep what you call here mid-skill jobs. Too often I see people say to the disappearance of manual labor jobs: good, retrain people to use computers. I have slowly come to the belief that there are some people for whom working with their hands is the only kind of sane work they can do. You can call them blue-collar, or working class (these are the people incidentally that raised me, the people…

I think you and the op are both missing that the vast majority of those mid skilled jobs still exist, they just exist in countries whose labor costs are drastically lower. When you realize that, you then realize that betting that your workers will be able to maintain a quality gap large enough to justify keeping them around is extremely questionable over the medium to long term because you are assuming some combinati…

I'm not sure waiting for the rest of the world to catch up is a good strategy as there always seems to be somewhere else that is still willing to work for less.

I suspect if manufacturing ever did come back it would be automated manufacturing.

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

#74

Post by z7 »

abrichr wrote: post #43
amadeuspagel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Yes. No. Yes.

To add to this, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_motor_veh... : # Country 2022 ---------------------------- 1 China 27,020,615 2 United States 10,060,339 3 Japan 7,835,519 4 India 5,456,857 5 South Korea 3,757,049 6 Germany 3,677,820 ... 18 United Kingdom 876,614

South Korea produces more cars than Germany with 32 million fewer people? Impressive.

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

#75

Post by fakedang »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #46
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…

I agree that we need to keep what you call here mid-skill jobs. Too often I see people say to the disappearance of manual labor jobs: good, retrain people to use computers. I have slowly come to the belief that there are some people for whom working with their hands is the only kind of sane work they can do. You can call them blue-collar, or working class (these are the people incidentally that raised me, the people…

> Too often I see people say to the disappearance of manual labor jobs: good, retrain people to use computers. I have slowly come to the belief that there are some people for whom working with their hands is the only kind of sane work they can do.

The people who say these kinds of things are usually pathetic specialists with a sole focus on their singular task, without looking at the big picture. They have limited interaction with the rest of the team/company/world, and think too highly of their talents and their jobs.

Tell a 50-yr old Java engineer to retrain in Python and Machine Learning, while juggling family, kids and a mortgage, and see how that goes. Newsflash, it doesn't go well. Heck, I've grown up on Android my entire student life, that now I can barely relearn mobile usage with an iPhone. One of the managing partners at my old firm, ex-Harvard and Wharton grad, stuck to using a Blackberry till 2020ish, because he couldn't figure out both.

Now expect a miner to learn how to code, like Joe Biden tells them to....

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

#76

Post by fakedang »

snapplebobapple wrote: post #62
JKCalhoun wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that we need to keep what you call here mid-skill jobs. Too often I see people say to the disappearance of manual labor jobs: good, retrain people to use computers. I have slowly come to the belief that there are some people for whom working with their hands is the only kind of sane work they can do. You can call them blue-collar, or working class (these are the people incidentally that raised me, the people…

I think you and the op are both missing that the vast majority of those mid skilled jobs still exist, they just exist in countries whose labor costs are drastically lower. When you realize that, you then realize that betting that your workers will be able to maintain a quality gap large enough to justify keeping them around is extremely questionable over the medium to long term because you are assuming some combinati…

> I think you and the op are both missing that the vast majority of those mid skilled jobs still exist, they just exist in countries whose labor costs are drastically lower.

They exist in lower income countries, but the work quality is often shoddy and poor at best. The talented ones have already migrated to the West. Case in point, a factory we built for a project in the Middle East with a fully European team took just 9 months to finish from the start of laying the foundation stone. Similar projects in the same country by a Chinese or local company would have taken 3-4 years. Another American team executed a project in Singapore in 2.5 years, but that same project was estimated to take 6 years in India.

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

#77

Post by eqvinox »

nwellnhof wrote: post #70
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…

> They are hard workers Where does this cliché come from? Germans work less than any other country on the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

> "Another important factor is the extent to which part-time work is widespread, […]"

I would argue being a "hard worker" means efficiency, not total amount. Sadly I don't have any data on that, or even any idea how to measure this.

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

#78

Post by intalentive »

MrDresden wrote: post #38

One of the myriad issues mentioned in that article is that Germany's workforce is not going to be able to sustain the economy after some years. What is the cause of that? There is plenty of immigration and with cost of living having been fairly low in many places in Germany for the last two decades, plus the economy booming in that time, why is there a lack of workers now (+-5-10 years)?

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

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

#79

Post by pgeorgi »

eqvinox wrote: post #77
nwellnhof wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are hard workers Where does this cliché come from? Germans work less than any other country on the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a... > "Another important factor is the extent to which part-time work is widespread, […]" I would argue being a "hard worker" means efficiency, not total amount. Sadly I don't have any data on that, or even any idea how to measure this.

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 country contributes to the GDP every hour (on average), which should serve as a reasonably proxy for efficiency.

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

#80

Post by kvonhorn »

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…

> I feel something is getting horribly out of balance

In my country, they dropped interest rates to near 0 in the wake of 9/11 in order to prevent the economy from crashing, and held them there until the Covid pandemic. It seems like that free money was used to buy _anything_ that could be invested in, driving up prices for assets like stocks, houses, and cryptocurrencies. I remember reading articles around 2018 that said that economists didn't know how the economy worked anymore.

The crazy low, long term interest rates are what _I_ feel has been freaky about the economy since at least 2005 when I looked at a dark, unremarkable 4 bedroom condominium priced at $400k, which was at least 6x my annual income.

It's felt like a huge house of cards has been built for over 20 years now, the whole economy outside of the service sector has been hollowed out, and I'm still waiting for it to all come crashing down.

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