Please summarize following comment section: 
The reliance of the German industry on the prolific use of petroleum and gas products isn't just an energy/heat generation story. Their economy sits on a foundation of cheap downstream intermediate products produced domestically with very few middlemen compared to other national industrial complexes: cheap propylene oxide, cheap monoethylene glycol, cheap acetaldehyde, cheap acrylonitrile, cheap cumene, cheap C4 aromatics, etc, etc,
Each of these chemicals, plus more that I haven't mentioned, sit at the base of their own value chains. All of those have recently lost their comparative savings versus product refined elsewhere which means an end to German manufacturers enjoying cheap rubbers, resins, coatings, greases, fuels, paints, plastics, etc

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jackcosgrove 11 hours ago | prev | next [–]

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, embraced competing on novelty. By being the first mover in many industries.

The Anglophone strategy led to greater internal inequality but seems to be better from an aggregate standpoint. I'd like to see Germany's manufacturing strategy work since it preserves mid-skill jobs, but this is casting doubt.

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JKCalhoun 11 hours ago | parent | next [–]

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 in my neighborhood growing up).

Why would anyone not want to work in a clean office with only a compiler as your boss and a big paycheck waiting for you every two weeks? When I was younger I assumed that anyone not in the tech field were people not smart enough to pass Algebra in high school. It had not occurred to me then that it might go beyond aptitude and instead be due to something more fundamental about a person's nature or character.

I know I'm getting hand-wavy with nature, character but I'm not sure what other words to use. I came to believe that though many people who are like me find some satisfaction from having solved a difficult problem, or having created a functional framework that can now do work to solve problems there are many others where satisfaction primarily comes from having changed something with their hands.

I don't know if all of that makes sense or resonates with anyone. I'll add this though, the older I get, the more I recognize even in myself the satisfaction that comes from doing something physical (even mowing the lawn as an example). I seem to take some pleasure from taking something unordered or in a raw state, and ending up with a thing in an ordered or "finished" state. It's no doubt why I have pursued woodworking as a hobby, print making, creating PCBs. (And that fresh mown lawn looks so much nicer than the ragged lawn that was there before.)

In any event, following that line of reasoning has made me realize we should keep a large number of manufacturing, construction, repair and other manual labor jobs so that we can serve the whole of society. Just expecting everyone to learn to code is misguided and will fail so many people.

It is sad to me that Germany appears to have tried this model, tried to keep manufacturing in their country, and yet it is purportedly failing. I'm not too optimistic about our future when we apparently measure progress by "cost of living standards".

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snapplebobapple 10 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

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 combination of there being a difference in your populations at a macro level (almost certainly wrong), that you will be able to innovate quality/other differentiating characteristics fast enough to maintain a large gap (almost certainly wrong, it's way harder to come up with something new vs copying the practices that exist already, especially when it is in the interest of the company in control of those practice to offshore for more profit), or your government will always be better in the specific subset of ways that maintains an advantage (better infrastructure, better regulation, etc. Also wrong when environmental regulation is at odds with profits and infrastructure only needs to be good between the factory and the port).
The better strategy is what everyone else has been doing, letting the third world catch up in labor costs for a few generations while ensuring you maintain the design capability. This does more than any ngo ever to decrease poverty and suffering, it will mean at some point in the future your labor won't be so starkly uncompetitive so eventually you can bring some manufacturing back, and it makes it less likely that the best and brightest arent' wasted on subsistence farming/made less due to childhood malnutrition in the third world, which should help us innovate faster in the future.

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JKCalhoun 4 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

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.

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snapplebobapple 3 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

depends on your definition of a good strategy.
None of the options are good for overpriced manufacturing labor in the first world that doesn't want to retrain/can't retrain.

Most of the options are good for the whole world, because manufacturing with less expensive labor usually translate to higher output for lower cost and the labor inflation that causes in the third world is in the really nasty subsistence level of the human suffering index rather than the can't afford a second car and/or the new video game console area of the human suffering index. The benefit to the world of labor price inflation in that level of the curve is so high it's not really comparable.

From the perspective of specific first world countries whether it is good or not depends on a mix of priorities from maintaining output capabilities in the face of potential war, maximizing the stuff your populace can get (bread and circuses limit political risk to rulers) and ensuring the spread between the upper and lower ends of society doesn't get so wide that the lower end looks up from its bread and circuses to revolt. Overall it will be a good strategy to move a significant portion elsewhere from this perspective as well.

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nradov 2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Geopolitics and military affairs can override labor cost issues to a limited extent. The global supply chain that was enabled by Pax Americana after WW2 is gradually breaking down. The US Navy is no longer willing or able to ensure worldwide freedom of navigation and so shipping on some major routes has become slower and less reliable. Sanctions and protectionist measures are fracturing the world into regional rather than global trading blocs. And governments are increasingly willing to subsidize strategic manufacturing industries (especially weapons) in order to avoid being dependent on unreliable trading partners.
Of course automation levels will continue to increase as they always have since the Industrial Revolution.

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fakedang 4 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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.

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snapplebobapple 3 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

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.
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nradov 2 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

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.

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snapplebobapple 11 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–]

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).
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fakedang 4 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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....

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Borg3 3 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

Yeah, our world started to move way too fast. In the past, new tech usually came slower so new generation could get hands on it, learn and then use it for life time. Now, you start learning on thing and sometimes even in the middle, you are going to switch because it become obsolete. Its insane.
What is more insane is, that whole progress I see in IT is just joke. All the new tooling that supposed to be better, easier to use and more productive is actually more bloated, slower and works against you. Yeah, indeed, sometimes its easier to start with a tool (aka, clickty clickty) but thats all.

Im heavy CLI user and I follow UNIX philosophy. I love it, write many simple tools and use them together. It works so well. Why abandom it?

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jijijijij 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

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 the notion that full-blown deindustrialization is anywhere close.

It's not all cars. It's a lot of things you haven't heard about, because they are highly specialized, niche industrial parts. I think, the German economy rests on the shoulders of Maschinenbau and, presumably, there is a whole lot less naked growth enabled "bullshit" products in that space.

Don't lie, don't you feel something is freaky with the economy? I don't just mean numbers and stock value... something more fundamental. Don't you feel overwhelmed by commerce, at times? Like, there is a lot of non-products produced. Almost violently pushed onto people, sickening amounts of "stuff" saturating all channels. How many mouths does marketing feed? There is so, so much marketing. Can this really be sustainable???

I don't know. I feel something is getting horribly out of balance and the service industry is a symptom. Rabid inequality is a symptom. Like core rot, it looks fine, until a little gust lays the tree onto your house.

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kvonhorn 3 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

> 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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jijijijij 1 hour ago | root | parent | next [–]

> I looked at a dark, unremarkable 4 bedroom condominium priced at $400k, which was at least 6x my annual income.
I suspect, people, even with comparatively high income, stopped being able to buy hard securities like houses. Why save up then? So, folk had a lot more "disposable income" to consume soothing, but overall transient consumable products and services like clothing, tech gadgets, food, subscriptions... – lifestyle stuff. You know: 1000$ sneakers and a 12$/month meditation app. A bit of luxury and the illusion of wealth. This in turn enabled an industry of bullshit pushers, who started manufacturing the demand for all these consumables, trying to reap a new massive YOLO market. All, of course, paying their 20% to the 1%.

Rents and living costs kept rising, so now we got to the point where "luxury" has become cheap, cheap lookalike instead, and most everybody is hustling to keep their "standard of living". Multiple jobs and a side gig, to pay for the fix and all your subscriptions... no pension, no pause. Ever.

> "You'll own nothing and be happy"

Look at the housing crisis and get all academic about the economy... What terrifies me, is this new, omnipresent private sell-out and monetization of social interactions. Everybody always has something to sell, is self-branding. Everybody wants to get in my head constantly, stomp their shit between my dopamine receptors. Too often, I feel exhausted and physically sick from this dynamic, I feel the sick. Decency and respect had their IPO.

And I am carrying a new generalized anger with me everywhere, which I see in fellow strangers, too. People are increasingly short-fused. The pandemic accelerated this. Traffic is mad.

I fear the fabric of the collective is on sale at this moment. Maybe the mandated growth dogma has hit the capacity of healthy attention or something. This is not just an economic bubble, but the exhaustion of a part human along with it. Someone is getting high on their own supply...

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tuatoru 1 hour ago | root | parent | next [–]

Your poetry (we don't have a good set of concepts to make this stuff prose, yet) reminded me of this[1].
1. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l...

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teleforce 36 minutes ago | prev | next [–]

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...

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nothercastle 15 minutes ago | parent | next [–]

Zero safety features?
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konschubert 11 hours ago | prev | next [–]

People are blaming energy prices but I don’t understand:
As far as I can tell, wholesale prices for both gas and electricity are lower than before the start of the war.

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throwaway4good 11 hours ago | parent | next [–]

I think the problem is that German energy is expensive compared to other countries.
On top of that you have regulation and lack of subsidies making other places more attractive to produce in ie. the US, Eastern Europe or China.

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skippyboxedhero 11 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

Correct. BASF is investing heavily in China. Nothing tells you more about this problem than the most German of companies moving to China.
BASF's largest plant in Germany was hooked up directly to Russian gas. Russian gas is now going to China. So are BASF.

I don't think regulation or subsidies are to blame either. Eastern Europe is receiving heavy investment because they have costs for workers under control and can provide a more stable political environment. The problem with Germany specifically is that they papered over a lot of bad fundamentals in the early 2000s with cheap energy and very close relations with Russia.

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throwaway4good 10 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

While the media focuses on China, Germany invests much more in the US. And if you summarize the investment in eastern europe, it is probably larger as well.
The current government has famously green policies: Shutting down nuclear plants and perhaps have a willingness to accept heavy industry leaving Germany. It is however a very unpopular government so I don't know if those policies will hold long term.

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konschubert 10 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Well, considering how great the Russia strategy of the German industry has worked out, I’m looking forward to bailing out basf
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spqrr 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

Yes, because industries (chemical especially) have already shut down their operations. Gas throughput is lower than before.
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_heimdall 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

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 likely to decrease quickly in response to prices.

Best I can tell, the temporary bump in prices in Europe were largely a factor of political plays making oil temporarily more scare while Russia and the oil industry adjusted. Prices are back down now because Russia and the oil industry found a new flow pattern to move Russian oil into the global supply.

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catdog 1 hour ago | root | parent | next [–]

> 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.

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_heimdall 8 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–]

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.

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spqrr 11 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

The sanctions are working. It's killing the German industry.
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The_Colonel 3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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).

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_heimdall 5 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–]

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?

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petre 2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

The sanctions worked somewhat. So did the destruction of North Stream. With it operational, Germany would have been buying Russian gas as usual. Recent Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries will work even better.
https://energyandcleanair.org/june-2023-monthly-snapshot-on-...

The German auto industry should be building tanks and APCs instead of obnoxious diesel SUVs. And they should build them like a Renault, not like an Audi or BMW which are not easily serviceable. Their Puma APC fleet is plagued with issues.

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nradov 2 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

And maybe German industry should build some regular guns as well so that their army will no longer have to rely on wooden broomsticks painted black.
https://www.newsweek.com/germany-cant-explain-use-broomstick...

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tom_ 1 hour ago | root | parent | next [–]

This does seem like a very ineffective way to defend yourself against the other teams in the training exercise, who will presumably be firing live ammo.
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mamonster 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

Supply curve shifts left, demand curve shifts left -> price is the same.
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konschubert 11 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

That’s not how demand curves work.
If you hold the price fixed or your decrease it, demand will increase, not decrease.

If you reduce supply, price finds a new equilibrium at lower demand, but that price is always HIGER than before. The fact that prices are equal or lower prices they this cannot be it.

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mamonster 11 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

That is exactly how they work if both demand and supply shift.
Example: P_d=100-Q P_s=Q

Solve P_d = P_s to get Q=50, P=50

Take a left shift like 80 - Q in demand, and take a left shift in supply like P=1.66Q. Solving now you get Q=30, P=50

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hokkos 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

Prices did got down but still not pre mid-2021 levels, and a lot of industries got close down during the high prices, also Biden plan to limit GNL export is not a good sign for Europe now that cheap russian gas is gone. Also electricity wholesale prices don't tell all, you then have to pay those renewable CfD and premiums somewhere.
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jillesvangurp 11 hours ago | prev | next [–]

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 workers and they have a culture of just getting shit done and being very proud of their ability to do so. This is part of their culture and value system.

The wave of conservatism that has crippled the country for decades is being challenged by a younger generation that is starting to take over from the baby boom generation that is the root of this problem. They inherited a booming economy and have been reluctant to change because they never had to. And now they are old and incapable of change, like most old people.

But that generation is on the way out. Most people that were employed before the cold war ended are now closing in on retirement age. Another ten years and the working force will consist exclusively of people that are used to using computers, never knew a Germany that wasn't united, and have modern ideas about how to run a company. Or indeed the country.

Germany has three challenges:

1) Infrastructure is a disgraceful mess and it needs fixing. Roads, rails, and energy sector. All of it.

2) There's an energy crisis that was caused by the Russians. Which is accelerating the trends that are causing the next challenge.

3) There's a lot of old industry that is becoming less relevant. Coal, steel, ICE cars, etc.

The fix for each of these challenges is addressing the first challenge. Doing so will fix all their issues and create a lot of jobs and economic opportunities. And unlike the US and China, Germany is not crippled by debt. They've been frugal and reluctant to spend. That's actually the main reason the infrastructure is a mess. But their credit rating is awesome. They are a bit slow and indecisive right now but with the right leadership, they can make a lot of changes in a short amount of time.

My prediction is that they will have largely cleaned up the energy sector by 2035-2040 at great cost. This is a good thing. All of that spending will flow directly into their economy. Spending lots of money is a great way to jump start an economy.

As a result, they will no longer be dependent on fossil fuel. This will really suck for economies whose main business is exporting that stuff. Related industries will have largely adapted or died off by then. Steel production will move to places where renewable energy is cheap and plentiful (i.e. not Germany). Part of the car industry will be sold off to the Chinese and the rest will have transitioned to battery electrical. This will be very tough for Germany but there's very little they can do to stop this at this point. The same conservatism that cripples their country is also in charge of these industries.

However, once the new energy sector start booming, there will be a lot of re-shoring of manufacturing that is currently happening in China. Formerly labor intensive production processes will transition to high tech and largely automated processes. Germany does high tech stuff extremely well. Both the Americans and the Chinese build EVs using equipment that is made in Germany. You look around in a Tesla factory and they have all the best stuff. Made in Germany. The key insight here is that Germany already makes all the things that they need for re-shoring manufacturing. Chips, machines that make chips, tools, machines, etc.

In short, they have the means and the money to do what needs doing, which is fixing their infrastructure. All they need to do is start doing that.

The key blocker for that is their bureaucracy. They are hopeless paper and process fetishists and stuck in their old ways. I often make fun of my German friends over this and they all are a bit ashamed and embarrassed about this. They are well aware and the next generation of politicians is going to have to do things differently in order to get the confidence of voters. Which is why they are all trying to outdo each other with plans on just how to do this.

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nwellnhof 5 hours ago | parent | next [–]

> 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...

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eqvinox 4 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

> 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.

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pgeorgi 4 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

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.

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Aloisius 2 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

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.

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eqvinox 2 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–]

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"?


	
mendigou 2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I also don't get it. I worked there for 8 years. I'm southern european and there was always a "half joke" about our lazyness. But we worked the hardest. My local colleagues were incredibly entitled and produced very little value.
In my opinion, Germany was at some point at the top of the world in most aspects, and the people became complacent over time. Which leads us to where we are today. Enshittification is palpable in every single aspect of society. No one cares about doing a good job anymore. Getting something done takes months where it should take days. And then that thing you got done breaks in a few weeks.

I'm sorry for the rant. I got pretty burned out of living there.

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euroderf 4 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

To paraphrase Stalin, "Quality has a quantity all its own."
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Helmut10001 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

Nice summary, thank you. As a German who has spend significant time in the US, too, I could not put my finger on the missing part within all these pessimistic other comments. But it is there: Germany and the US are still very similar, if you leave some details aside. Just the timing is problematic at the moment. We will see. One big question is whether we can stop the AfD. The next big question is if we can channel all the energy from young people to do the necessary changes that the current old generation couldn't, for various reasons. Don't be blinded: Not just Germany is in a transition phase, the whole world is. One (of many) fragile moment(s) in the history of humans.
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mendigou 2 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

How is Germany similar to the US? Perhaps in the enshittification of society, but certainty not in the forces that drive innovation.
Germany could be that innovation hub in Europe, and it seems incredibly resistant to do so. And all of the EU is trailing behind, unfortunately.

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mamonster 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

So the green bright future is in 10 years and it will take a lot of hard work to get there?
If that's the path to success, AfD will be at 50% within 2 years.

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jillesvangurp 9 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

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 of debate and kind of hard to pin down to more than "I don't like X". Where X is foreigners, people that look a bit funny, the weather, or whatever else they saw on TV. Vaguely disgruntled and angry is the dominating sentiment.
He may or may not get a government together. But if he does, it will likely be short lived and implode under its own madness. This is not actually the first time this is happening in my country. The last time was a wild ride of ludicrously incompetent people doing silly things until the whole thing ended. This round looks like it's going to be a repeat of that. Very similar to the Trump presidency, actually.

The AFD may very well end up in power at some point but it will probably be their undoing. Kind of a necessary evil and it will definitely shake a few things up if it happens. But a bit of short lived shock therapy like that might actually not be that bad for Germany. Either way, I don't see them getting anywhere near 50%.

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mamonster 8 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

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 strategy, but IMO they are playing a very explosive game: They are basically trying to force some "unelected" organ to ban them, and on the basis of that get a boost and then get into power on a mandate of "everything should be democractic", which would allow them to dismantle any institutions that don't work with elections and use referendums to go around any Rechtsstaat considerations

CDU/SPD could easily let them into government, stonewall them using the civil service for like 4 years and kill the party, but they are too dumb for that.

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somewhereoutth 4 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

> 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.

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jseliger 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

There's an energy crisis that was caused by the Russians
I think you misspelled "an energy crisis that was caused by short-sightedly failing to invest in and build out nuclear power."

Germany was warned for decades about the dangers of relying on Russia, and ignored the warnings.

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tuatoru 1 hour ago | parent | prev | next [–]

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/...

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sschueller 11 hours ago | prev | next [–]

IMO the cheap Russian gas was keeping Germany afloat while it was already crumbling. Germany has been too slow in adapting for the modern age, building out their infrastructure such as fiber[1] or even finishing their part of the NRLA[2] which is still not even close to being finished. They added too much red tape for every little crap[3] making it incredibly difficult for any business to get anywhere (small German you-tubers are dragged to court because they forgot to place a small disclaimer on their website which could have been handled with a small fine or warning).
In recent times trying to compete with other countries a lot has been privatized making the whole thing even worse. You have private infrastructure resulting in the same road being ripped up multiple times every-time another fiber provider wants to add service. You also have the once 80%+ on time rail network being so late that trains are stopped at the Swiss border to prevent time shifts in the tight Swiss schedule. While Switzerland implemented Clock-face scheduling a long time ago Germany moved the date to 2070[4]!

You also now have private low budget trains running on the network. These companies cut corners to the maximum and if one of these trains breaks down it blocks the track. Unlike a bus, you can't just drive around it.

There are also still large parts of the German rail network that aren't electrified. The trip from Zürich to München only recently has been electrified not requiring a locomotive switch.

IMO, infrastructure needs to be public, roads, rail and fiber. Companies need to make money for their shareholders and with infrastructure the profit comes from long term economic growth of a region. This does not translate to direct company profit.

[1] https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe... [DE]

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLA

[3] https://www.politico.eu/article/spam-email-gdpr-lawsuits/

[4] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/bahn-deutsc... [DE]

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Biologist123 12 hours ago | prev | next [–]

Anecdata: investment in robot and 3D builders is ramping up in Germany in response to labour shortages and increasing costs. Source: a German friend in the sector.
I guess it’s good this issue is being openly discussed. Having a good problem statement is always a good start. By contrast in the UK, deindustrialisation of the 80s/90s/00s was not a massive political topic. And the ensuing enshittification of the economy caught many by surprise.

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skippyboxedhero 11 hours ago | parent | next [–]

UK economy isn't shit, still a very wealthy country. The problem is that the ratio of productive to unproductive has shifted significantly.
Look at how many lawyers, civil servants, other government workers, management consultants the UK can afford to support. Housing hundreds of thousands of economic migrants for free. That is a rich economy. The problem is that the productive section of the economy isn't growing (and a lot of the unproductive activities, for example paying lawyers hundreds of thousands per year to block industrial development, are blocking growth).

The same is true of Germany. Of almost every economy in Western Europe bar NL.

There is no "labour shortage"...I don't even understand how that is supposed to work. There is a price for labour, if you can't pay it then you will go out of business. Companies: refuse to train staff, complain that no-one is trained, rely on mass importation of migrant labour, and then also complain that they can't afford to pay more (when they refuse to hire any higher-skill staff who can actually improve productivity)...these aren't real problems. Economic inactivity rates are sky-high across Western Europe WHILST companies say there is a labour shortage. Who believes this?

Deindutrailisation was an absolutely huge political topic in the 80/90/00s. It was probably the biggest economic topic throughout the 80s. The "enshittificaton" caught no-one by surprise apart from politicians who believed that the 2000s (specifically) were a time of massive prosperity (you still see this, Starmer goes on continuously about how wonderful the 2000s were, great time for laywers/bankers/landlords, people like him). Throughout the 90/00s, they pumped government jobs into these areas...and are now surprised that everyone else has run out of money to support these people doing nothing? (Same thing has happened in Germany with the East btw, same thing in France, Italy, Spain).

I agree that identifying the problem is the issue but it is far deeper than deindustrialization (the discussion of which got us here because the "solution" was: mass government intervention into certain areas to try and boost the vote for whatever party thought they could win...it should be no coincide that elections in the UK are now won and lost in the areas of "deindustrialization" AND nothing happens to fix these areas beyond politicians promising a mystery box full of cash).

That this is happening simultaneously in many Western European countries and other developed countries should be the clue that it is cultural.

Economic growth has never been easier, costs have never been lower, potential has never been higher. People should ask why we are circling the drain even more rapidly whilst other countries are smashing it.

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orwin 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

Automation in the works since at least 2016 in western Europe, it was a leg of the Boost4.0 project (an other leg was better repairability and part manufacturing, which might have pushed 3d printing but I haven't worked on that part so do not believe me on this, it's an unfounded guess).
The leftist in me is sad to acknowledge that (not really, I'm more on the autogestion side), but EU institutions dropped the ball on this subjects, the main drivers were auto companies and universities/engineering schools.

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MrDresden 11 hours ago | prev | next [–]

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)?

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intalentive 4 hours ago | parent | next [–]

German workers are famously productive. Non-German substitutes are unlikely to be so industrious.
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polotics 1 hour ago | root | parent | next [–]

Can you substantiate this statement?
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bamboozled 11 hours ago | prev | next [–]

Which developed nation isn't in this position?
America is an Industrial super power? Japan? England? Korea?

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amadeuspagel 11 hours ago | parent | next [–]

Yes. Yes. No. Yes.
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abrichr 11 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

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
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z7 4 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

South Korea produces more cars than Germany with 32 million fewer people? Impressive.
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fsloth 11 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

When you first learn that the industrial revolution started in England, you imagine it must be still amazing given 200 years at it. Then you grow up, and learn what they actually did was 100 years of manufacturing with the same infrastructure since they could just funnel their product to the colonies, and when their empire collapsed, they were finally forced to compete in the open market, at which point they chose to close down manufacturing and focus on finance.
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vmchale 11 hours ago | unvote | prev | next [–]

Shutting down nuclear plants surely couldn't have helped.
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pgeorgi 11 hours ago | parent | next [–]

The last new nuclear plant to go online in Germany was Greifswald 5 in November 1989. For 23 days.
Given the massive failure of AVR Jülich, whose design was supposed to be "fail safe" while it's now the most 90Sr-contaminated nuclear facility world-wide, and the corruption around it, there's little trust that even if the technology is safe, operations would be.

That accident in Jülich was 1979, rumors that something happened were struck down with political support, and so the acknowledgement by the operator was 21 years later in 2000 and the government confirmed it only in 2010. The plan for decommissioning is to get it done by the end of this century, after we "develop some procedure during the next 60 years." (that is, we have no f'ing clue what to do with that thing right now). By that time, the incident has been 120 years ago...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor (and even more so its German equivalent page) has the gory details of that mess. Germany likes to do things at industrial scale, and so it also messes up at industrial scale.

As a result (and while Chornobyl didn't help the nuclear-power cause, the German anti-nuclear-power movement predates that incident by ~10 years), Germany moving away from nuclear power has been a long time coming.

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whearyou 11 hours ago | prev | next [–]

The West will be the poorer for it
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FrustratedMonky 12 hours ago | prev | next [–]

The article lists a lot of things going bad for Germany. But was there some underlying reason? Like demographics, shrinking population?
Or is it just the obvious , Russian gas, rising Energy costs, now their prices are too high, so exports are down.

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tormeh 11 hours ago | parent | next [–]

Demographics is the big one. Obviously fewer workers and more retirees, but also a gerontocracy where many parties primarily want to go back to some idealised version of the past. The CDU is basically the party of 1960s car adverts. The Greens are hippies, recent management notwithstanding. The SPD has an identity crisis, but before that was classic cold-war social democrats. The Left is fortunately going extinct, but was classic Warsaw Pact. There’s a bit of a trend here. The general population is generally looking backwards, and decision-makers and bureaucrats skew even older than the general population.
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skippyboxedhero 11 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

Demographics aren't the issue.
Japan has had relatively bad aging, per capita growth for working-age population since 1990 is equal to the US.

Indeed, the issue of demographics has been a massive problem because politicians repeat the mantra: population cannot age, we must mass import. Okay...but most high productivity people aren't going to Germany (and to be clear, this has been the case in France, the UK, many other places). So they just get more minimum-wage workers who drag down productivity/incomes.

I agree with your point about the parties but Japan is a very backwards-looking society, they have had none of these issues. Their economic policy hasn't been perfect but if you compare to Western Europe: they haven't made a lot of those errors either so naturally ended up in a better place.

With Germany, there is an issue with pension sustainability without population growth...but the problem is: pension sustainability not a lack of population growth (even if it wasn't, as I explain above, it is quite literally impossible today to solve this issue with immigration...the productive people aren't leaving the US, it isn't happening).

You have seen Western Europe go even harder on population growth and (if anything) economic growth has just accelerated lower.

Economic growth is quite simple: make things that people want, train people to make those things, do it all very cheaply (look at Eastern Europe, higher standard of living, lower incomes so lower wages and more business investment, sensible investment in government services...these economies weren't even on the map when Germany was going through the 2000s slump).

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tormeh 11 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

Is Japan actually in a better place? GDP per capita is worse, work hours are longer, debt is much higher, birth rates are lower. Citation needed.
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skippyboxedhero 9 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

You have asked for a citation whilst listing a bunch of things that are quantifiable but which may or may not matter depending on your PoV...I notice you didn't mention crime...why is that it? Lack of citations?
Asking for citations does not mean that the things you cite are relevant or useful.

GDP per capita growth since 1990 is equal to the US. Yes, this is good. Work hours are longer...than what? They are shorter than the US and most of Europe by OECD data...where are your citations? Debt is higher...than what? Personal rates of debt are lower, and they have a huge net foreign asset position...did you cite something without understanding what it meant? Birth rates are lower...yes, why is this bad? It hasn't impacted GDP per capita...so why is it bad? Again, is this something you are "citing" without understanding?

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ffgjgf1 3 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

> GDP per capita growth since 1990 is equal to the US
Not it’s not. That’s just an absurd claim. Japan had even GDP per capita with the US in 1990, briefly overtook it ~1995.

Now US has more than twice as high GDP per capita (76k vs 34k). The Japanese economy has been stagnant since the mid 90s…

In PPP it’s almost as bad (45k vs 76k).

Now look at Japan and Germany, they were about even until 2007 now Germany is massively ahead.

> citing" without understanding?

Coming from someone who didn’t even bother looking up how Japan’s GDP per capita changed (or rather stayed stagnant) over the last 20+ years?

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treprinum 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

I'd say the main problem is "leadersh*t", incompetent captains of industry. It's so pervasive and prevalent that I really don't see any hope for them. People are also getting more and more unprofessional and expect high pay for subpar results. Devs on the other hand are hugely underpaid and the country operates in a two caste system of managers vs everybody else though not as badly as the UK. There is also a high aversion to risk; a friend of mine who built a successful company told me that in order to get 1M from a bank they essentially had to pay them 1M upfront.
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iforgotpassword 11 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

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 the job, representing the whole dev department.
Anecdotal!

This was about a decade ago, suddenly ran into a guy I knew from highschool who studied CS in another city. Told me he dropped out during his master's because he failed math, then got hired by a medium-sized company making sensors and actuators, who now wanted to enter the smart home business. Remote controllable relays for power outlets basically, energy meters, door-open sensors, not much more at that point. He was basically the only dev for the first six months, then got promoted to team lead and had two other devs working for him.

He was inexperienced and had quite the ego when I talked to him back then. He was smug about using Arch Linux while I was on debian. He then went on and excitedly told me "did you know!? you can't just use ssh to get a shell on another computer, but tunnel arbitrary data over it!" I guess you don't learn much just copying commands from the Arch Linux wiki all day. Anyways, when I told him I don't think this project will go anywhere and will pretty much be done once Google or any other big player decides to enter that space, he just brushed it off because "they will have been there first". Needless to say, he's not with that company any more, but not after suffering some burnout... Two years after college!

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sneed_chucker 3 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

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.

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tuatoru 50 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–]

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.
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JPLeRouzic 11 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> People are also getting more and more unprofessional
> the country operates in a two-caste system

I don't know for today but I remember in the 1980' some German engineers playing games on their computers during work at Deutsch Telecom.

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treprinum 11 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

An accounting professor of Turkish origin in my MBA program in the US was making fun of Germany after the Wirecard scandal that he could have imagined such crime in Turkey but never in Germany and then shrugged his shoulders.
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pgeorgi 11 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

Just look where Marsalek comes from: We import our criminals from Austria.
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zelphirkalt 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

Bad governments that actively hinder progress on many fronts (just look for example at Wissing as a transport minister being completely anti train service, destroying infrastructure for the people, while dancing to the tune of car manufacturers), lining their own pockets, corruption, unfettered lobbyism and bad policies for education system added their weight to this.
A country can only take so much incapability and corruption, before things go downhill.

As a German I warn, we better watch Germany very closely, if the likes of AfD get to power. Way too many people are either desperate enough or uninformed enough or disappointed enough to vote for the far right bordering illegal.

This has all been in the making for a long time, due to previous and current governments. A party like FDP is very far removed from its originally held values, and would love to jump in bed with the far right AfD, if that brought them into the government again after the Ampel coalition. They are traitors of democracy basically, just like CDU.

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Xunjin 11 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

Isn't the German policy tracking down NeoNazis on AfD? IIRC there is even a movement on closing down a specific party. I remember hearing a news about it.
Btw I love DW news, such a great channel.

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pgeorgi 10 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

There were some calls to shut down AfD, but that's probably too difficult (and the process is difficult for good reasons!), and having them "certified by the courts that they're not extremist enough to be closed down" might be just the advertisement they seek.
The current target seems to be the "Junge Alternative", the AfD's youth organization. Since that's just an association and not a party, it's an easier target. Also, the party youth organizations tend to be more radical than their "grown-up" counterparts, so it's probably relatively simple to make a case there.

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qznc 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

Yes, i think all ofthese are factors.
A particularly annoying one is the debt break (Schuldenbremse) Germany introduced a few years ago. It prevents many investments currently. This one could be fixed relatively quickly though.

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konschubert 11 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

It does not prevent investments by industry at all.
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qznc 7 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

I agree, but I have no clue how to fix that. Many industries should take on more debt but somehow they don’t. Maybe they lack ideas what to do with the money?
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formerly_proven 11 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> This one could be fixed relatively quickly though.
In the sense that you could just repeal it, but not in the sense that there is a majority for that. The opposition parties are against repealing it, because it damages the current government, and roughly half or more of the government coalition are also against repealing it, because they consider austerity sound economic theory (meanwhile the other half considers rapidly ballooning welfare and transfer payments a feature, not a bug, and also believes rent control works, so arguably there just aren't very many adults in the room setting German economic policy right now).

So it's something that cannot be fixed quickly because people are actively against fixing it.

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lagrange77 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

I think the dependence on china as a) a competitor in the supplier market, b) as a sales market and c) as an indispensable supplier of semi-finished products for its own industry also plays a major role.
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pgeorgi 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

Several decades of politics and industry kicking the can down the road and hoping that the challenges go away by itself.
For example: German car makers are still somewhat reluctant to embrace electric motors (no matter the power source or storage) and would like to stay with combustion engines (no matter the combustible) because that's a niche they and the entire downstream industry feel comfortable with.

Yes, a large share of the industrial base in Germany hinges on it. But a long-term view on things would have started divesting from this exclusivity decades ago. Instead, they hoped the challenge just goes away by building better combustion engines. There's _finally_ some movement in that direction (Volkswagen embracing EVs is huge), but there are also still reactionary pockets that try to water everything down because hydrogen or synthetic fuels are right around the corner, just you wait! (possible, but very unlikely)

Another example from the industry: The chemical industry never hedged their reliance on fossils, either. While they will remain a consumer of fossils for chemical processes, the industry was comfortable just heating whatever they need to be really hot with them as well. Now they're scrambling to retool their factories to still use fossils where impossible to replace (e.g. fertilizer production uses the chemical properties) but to use hydrogen when stuff just needs to get hot. That the amount of fossil fuel might go down was _kinda_ obvious with all those CO2-reduction targets, but they preferred to wait it out.

I see more hope with them, though: they need to retool, but after the furnaces use hydrogen (wherever that comes from), they can do business as usual (and gradually optimize hydrogen sourcing). The car industry (some say that 20% of the German industrial base rely on that directly or indirectly) is much worse off.

Another example, this time politics: Deutsche Bahn (DB) is a private company fully owned by the government. There's some money going back and forth between the company and its owner, but one of the arrangements was that DB pays for maintenance of its infrastructure itself, but catastrophic loss of infrastructure (and related repairs/rebuilds) are covered through government money. What is the private company (that was expected to pay some 8-9 digit sums of earnings back to the federal budget for years as part of that back-and-forth) doing then? Cut down on maintenance. When stuff breaks entirely, repairs aren't on them, so that's the "rational" choice for the company. Politicians were asleep at the wheel as far as these incentives are concerned (or worse: they calculated with them, kicking the can down the road.)

There are advocates for moving more logistics from the road to rail, but that's kinda stuck because there's a huge repair-and-investment plan right now (to deal with that oversight of decades) that will block various key routes for the next few years.

And it's not as if the Autobahn-network is any better off (map with construction sites at https://www.autobahn.de/die-autobahn): lots of bridges from the 60s reaching their end-of-life all at once because maintenance is an expense that was better ignored (since politicians decided that above all else, the country mustn't increase its debt: So we had a kinda-balanced budget but accrued the steel-and-concrete equivalent of tech debt)

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throwaway4good 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

There is plenty of migration from south and Eastern Europe into Germany so demographics is not an issue.
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messiah_complex 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

Demographics. The Baby Boomers have started to retire. Population is aging, birth rates are low, labor pool is shrinking.
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FrustratedMonky 11 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

But why would people retiring cause plants to close.
The article talks about layoffs.

But if they are having layoffs, and people can't find work, that would indicate they do have workers, not a shortage of workers.

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messiah_complex 11 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

Not just about the raw number of people. When your hear "the population is aging," it means the median age is increasing over time. It puts a lot of strain on an economy when the ratio of retirees to working age people gets too high. Retirees are expensive.
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konschubert 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

Gas prices are lower than before the war.
So that cannot be it.

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imtringued 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

Killing the domestic economy while favouring the export surplus economy.
People don't seem to understand that Germany's export strategy is fueled by debt. It looks fine from the perspective of Germany alone, but this strategy has resulted in an overall increase in debt in the entire euro area and Germans are hypocritical enough to think that they are the heroes saving the EU when the situation is the exact opposite. Euro area debt is bailing out the German export economy.

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jsmcgd 12 hours ago | prev [–]

I feel I've seen this movie before.
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dlahoda 11 hours ago | parent | next [–]

what?
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jeff_carr 11 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

You know, the one where Germany is falling in stature on the international stage so it pulls itself up from it's bootstraps so it can once again rise up to an international superpower. I forget the title. I think they made a sequel.
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peteradio 10 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

"The Grand Foray" I believe is what you are thinking.
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spqrr 11 hours ago | parent | prev [–]

My grandparents lived through this and were fine. It'll be ok I'm sure.
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lagrange77 11 hours ago | root | parent [–]

? Would you elaborate, just to be sure we're talking about the same movie?
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spqrr 11 hours ago | root | parent [–]

If you are offended or amused you are interpreting it correctly.
EDIT: Maybe I got it wrong but as as I understand grandparent is referring to the increasingly Weimar-like conditions politically and economically.

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