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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Yes? Easily.
This realization is still extremely far out for a huge percentage of the German populace unfortunately.