Not just the economy experiences a crisis. The chancellor is a swing door candidate from the BlackRock. Curiously right hereafter it’s raining exorbitant sums. This smells of crisis, too. And all the scandals, more frequent and worse still. Climate? Crisis wherever I look. An accelerando crescendo. It’s getting difficult to keep up the pink glasses.
But industry leaders are increasingly voicing frustration that the efforts are moving too slowly and are insufficient to tackle a host of deep-rooted problems, from chronic labour shortages to heavy bureaucratic burdens.
This is framing/parroting that the article doesn’t correct.
“In Germany, entrepreneurship as such no longer really exists,” he told AFP.
“little innovation”
The overall assessment is correct, but they have the causes wrong.
The number of people who are looking for a job is higher than the number of job openings. There is a problem with education and hiring “mindsets”. The demand is that cheap workers are supplied by “the system” somehow, meaning immigration or some other scheme (but those don’t work). Immigration has the additional challenge that people who do immigrate face multiple issues that often end up driving them again, or they do stay and were sort of kind of meant to do that work, like the syrian refugees, but they are barred from doing it either because their education isn’t accepted as equivalent, or they don’t speak German. Which is particularly a problem in public facing jobs or complex jobs that require good communication.
Meanwhile, purchasing power relative to cost of living has fallen too low. We have a housing problem, like everywhere else, it seems. Which wouldn’t be a problem, if people had the purchasing power to just invest and build themselves. There are some additional problems that are used as scapegoats, like permits taking too long, but ultimately it’s about the price of building being too high. And that includes mostly other factors than cost of labour: the price of the land and material.
“Innovation” doesn’t happen. Meaning, it does happen, but it happens at scales where it doesn’t fuel the economy. There are successful new companies who are starting to make niche products, but if that’s like a 10-20 person team and they just fill the niche they’re in, that’s that. All the bigger companies are stuck in boomer management mentality hell. Even if “innovation” did happen that could scale, they wouldn’t adopt it. They resisted doing that for the last 40-50 years and that mentality is finally catching up to them.
Heavy industry, from car-making to producing factory equipment and steel, remains crucial to the German economy.
It really doesn’t. Production is a weak 23% of the GDP.
Like, they wish they had product that was selling, a company that wasn’t producing and all that is lacking is a few people to put on a production line to get the engine going again. But we ‘solved’ that with automation. That was the point.
Finally, there is a hidden problem of lots of professionals going into retirement and the companies are awful at knowledge transfer, so not only are they struggling now, it’s highly likely that the people who have an understanding of how to do the actual work are just going into retirement without the companies being able to replace them. Because they have no understanding of what their skills even are, never mind how to pass them on.
…and of course everything that politicians could do, is something that the companies wouldn’t want and particularly wouldn’t want to pay for. So. Yeah. it’s a problem.
“interesting times”
Deepest crisis for who? How big was the economy in post war Germany compared to now? How does the infrastructure of today compare to leveled cities all around? It‘s not looking great but that‘s mostly because of the same people who keep repeating how dire everything is while keep making the wrong decisions. One thing is certain, however: Germany won‘t see change for the better under it‘s current government.