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Rainy Day visitor Aidan responds to yesterday's Jermany posting about Germany's efforts to emulate Japan.
"I think it's perfectly clear that Germany already is the Euro area's Japan.If you were to given the job of enumerating the structural problems of this country the hardest job would be knowing when to stop. After all there is only so much paper in the world.
The root cause however is easy. Germany is the land ideas forgot. Somewhere in the late 70s the German mind freeze dried. While the Anglosphere and other European countries examined post-Keynesian economics, the balance of individual responsibility and welfare provision, changing demographics and national identity, the relationship between education and industry and above all, the nature of the post communist world, Germany ploughed on as before. Curiously the one country that had most been affected by the collapse of the USSR's empire became the country most unwilling to examine the social, economic and intellectual implications of that collapse.
Not to say that there wasn't debate, but the conclusion was always the same: a firm resolution to do nothing. Never change a winning formula, even when it stops winning, is the key idea. Despite publicity grabbing speaches, German thinking remains utterly anti-reform.
Looking at the prospects for change today one cannot be optimistic. Everyone agrees that change is necessary so long as everything stays the same.
Unions demand parity for workers in west and east irrespective of the lower living costs in the east. Students see no reason to curtail their 20 semester sojourn in education (leading to an massive exclusion of the educated from the workforce), retirement often begins at 50, either by choice or through German reluctance to employ anyone over 45. Shedding workers from the massive, unproductive state sector is a taboo even for the desparate Schroeder. The deaded Beamter status, which give rise to Germany's notoriously lazy public sector workers, remains inviolate. Suggest that shops should stay open an hour or too longer on Saturday and the unionised workers take to the streets.
Germany will not reform itself and renew itself until there is a prior opening of the German mind. Looking at the Anti-American antagonism of the past months I can see no prospect of that happening within the term of the current administration.
A."
