Germany went from envy of the world to the worst-performing major developed economy.
Germany racked up one economic success after another for most of this century. But the loss of Russian natural gas due to the war in Ukraine has dealt a severe blow to its industry through higher energy costs.
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Every country will struggle in the near future. Some sooner, some later. To me it seams like we have reached the limits of what we can have. What we have is very badly distributed but it really comes down to how many things, how many computers, shoes, containerships, gold watches, private jets, truckloads of harvested corn, clothes and everything else can there be. We could redistribute and we could recycle but we're not doing both in any meaningful amount.
Remember, this metric of "worst performing county" takes only the economy into account and with limited resources there is no endless growth.
Btw. This doesn't mean we can't be happy. We're not the economy and we're not the stuff we own.
We’re not the economy and we’re not the stuff we own.
This realization is still extremely far out for a huge percentage of the German populace unfortunately.
I'd say it's more the whole western world as a whole, not just Germany.
Yes, that's true. After all, Germany is still more or less a welfare state with statutory health insurance and so on. To further undermine this in favor of economic competitiveness does not seem desirable to me, for example in view of the situation in America.
Can a welfare state still function with zero or temporarily negative GDP growth?
I am not an economist, but I do think that it is important for a country that its citizens have money to spend, that they are sufficiently educated to be able to participate in the digital world and that they can work productively because they are healthy. From that point of view, I think that this is worth invsting in and that political reform that is predominantly based on sustainable economics would make sence (in Germany, there is a difference between the so-called "Volkswirtschaftslehre" (economics), which focuses on overall political and social issues, and the "Betriebswirtschaftslehre" (business administration), which deals with the successful management of companies - the latter was way more influencial in German politics since the 80s). It just seems to me that the neoliberal doctrine that the market would regulate itself has proven itself wrong by now. So, in my opinion, reforms are needed to put a stop to neoliberal capitalism, which I feel has gone off the rails in the past decades. This seems just necessary to me; especially in the context of climate change. I simply don't believe that individual companies can operate sustainably as long as they are primarily pursuing short-term profit interests.
Yes? Easily.
Can you still bathe in as much or temporarily less amount of water?
The whole world will have a GDP slump in a couple of decades when the reduced child mortality rates in the global south hit the fertility rate and overall population drops and manufacturers will have to face the fact that fewer people don't use more washing machines.
Heck without exports the German economy would already have shrunk the last decades, the only reason we didn't is because other countries developed, buying vehicles, factories and plants, electronics, whatnot. We wouldn't be able to even begin to consume all that stuff ourselves. "Hey, Germans, buy three million cars to make up for the shortfall!" -- nah that's going to happen what am I supposed to do with a car and the Poles already all drive German cars.
Or, differently put: With the automation tech of ten years ago the whole world could have 70% unemployment and still produce western middle-class living standards for everyone (modulo cars which are a bad idea anyway use public transport). I don't have exact numbers but Germany on its own, only exporting enough to have a net zero on the balance sheet, should be able to hit around 40% or so, and that's with the incentives for capital to actually automate still being terribly low (high ROI but also long-term meanwhile in five years it'll be cheaper). Thus, meanwhile, our unemployment.
