> It is still a wonderful culture, people, and country.
Of course it is. But that doesn't make the problems less real.
The demographic pressure cooker is still cooking-- a greater and greater proportion of national resources go to support an ever increasing fraction of the old, and stopping this is impossible at this point. Prospects for dating and marriage are collapsing for a large chunk of the populace. Government debt is increasing as a share of GDP and with the change in the dependency ratio and declining populace default looks increasingly likely in the long term.
3rd highest GDP in the world, wonder how much is just that for their pop size they are already super high. Germany looks almost no different, yet I rarely hear about German stagnation (could just be me though).
As an outsider they seem to have a lot higher quality of life than the US in many ways.
Compared to the other nations in the EU Germany is near the top in taxes, near the bottom in median wealth/savings, near the top in productivity, near the bottom in home ownership, near the top in total life-years work until retirement and near the bottom in retirement pension as percentage of the working income.
Germany was a wealthy country once, now it's a disgrace for the median citizen. It's bureaucracy is overbearing and inefficient. It's political class at once haughty, arrogant, incompetent, and corrupt.
Anyone but big business, the rich and the government paid parasitical classes (politicians, bureaucrats and the state media propagandists) gets fucked all day, every day.
Germany is a country in decline. The leadership of the ruling party of the last 16 years is indifferent if not actively hostile towards the common people while the major opposition parties are, if anything, even worse. They have the cool rationality, economic competency and sober long-sightedness of an ethanol-pickeled naked mole rat in a blast furnace.
I wish I could believe otherwise, but as things currently stand I fear that Germany is done. It'll just take a few more decades until everyone notices.
Wow, this reply is so strong. It sounds like you a person who knows Germany very well. What country do you think is doing any of these things better than Germany? Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Uruguay, Israel, South Korean, Taiwan, Japan? Please share your thoughts.
Sorry, but I feel GDP is meaningless when discussing quality of life for average people. Example: China is now regularly touted as having the world second largest GDP, recently surpassing Japan. But GDP per capita is more than a decade away from catching up (and that is optomistic). Also, even GDP per capita isn't a very good measurement if wealth distribution is very skews or social mobility is very low.
The demographic one is the real killer. Debt is high compared to their GDP, and their GDP is not growing, and there is a big structural headwind with the population shrinking and getting older.
> Germany looks almost no different, yet I rarely hear about German stagnation
Germany has smaller versions of the same demographic and growth problems. However, Germany's real GDP has increased by about 30% in the last 20 years, versus Japan managing about 18%. About 50% for the United States.
Japan's real PPP GDP 4.634T in 2009, 5.261T in 2019 = 13.5% growth in 10 years.
Germany 3.696T in 2009, 4.471T in 2019 = 20.9%.
Japan grew at 2/3rds the rate of Germany in the last 10 years, against the backdrop of a significantly worse 10 years before that.
The shape of the graph looks similar, but the difference between 1.019^n and 1.012^n over a long time is massive. Not to mention that Germany is not particularly healthy.
Yes, it'll be about 23 years at the present pace for Germany to surpass Japan in absolute terms, but Japan has a much larger population and Germany has better prospects for long term growth.
Germany's debt is ~60% of GDP, and Japan's is 240%, too, which is pretty terrifying when GDP is not growing much and may begin to contract in absolute terms from demographic changes.
All well and good, still, the perception and reality I don't think match. I've had this conversation many times where people just instinctually cite 'oh Japan is in decline, doing really poorly, etc', and then I tell them they are 3rd highest GDP in the world, had a huge growth wave in the mid-2010s and I get pikachu-face shocked reactions. Even here, I think you're falling for the meme.
It's funny, your graph cuts off right before it, and is a perfect example of extrapolating too soon. It's that one big recession dip, and since then are doing better, and before that doing better. More spurts, higher angles recently.
I think there is some misunderstanding here about reading a graph for growth rate. Anything that starts off higher is likely to have "higher angles" even if it shows a lower growth rate. Which looking at the numbers, we see-- we already did the arithmetic a couple posts ago. Part of why the per capita series looks so bad: it starts at about the same value so the effect of a higher baseline is not so misleading.
The debt to GDP problem, combined with anemic GDP growth and population structural factors that make high growth unlikely for a century, combine to be a big concern that you haven't addressed. Instead you handwave at graphs in a way that doesn't boost anyone's understanding.
I think Germany taking two decades to catch up combined with Japans higher growth outside the recession looks better, I’d bet Japan next decade based on a lot of things, mostly software and tech. The debt may be a factor, but that’s a hypothesis not a fact so you should state it as such, it’s not stopped other countries from defaulting.
Easy to endlessly discuss this though, but without good faith on your side it won’t go anywhere useful.
I stand strongly by the point that anyone spouting Japan stagnation memes is just repeating shallow media talking points that are outdated and don’t reflect reality on the ground... yea, stagnation from a trajectory to be bigger than the US in GDP from a tiny island nation. Without so so many of the problems of the US. The quality of life there is incredibly high, they’re incredibly rich, they’re adjusting many soft factors to be better to work, women, and newer economic abilities.
It’s very roughly like if everyone went around talking about how Ferrari is stagnating, when they’ve had 2/5 popular cars in the last decade (incl one this year) and most other carmakers had 3/5 (but most none this year). Ok, maybe you can argue that, and I wouldn’t agree but fine, but it’s still a Ferrari and the rest of the world is driving Kia. The meme has gotten so strong people are actually out there now thinking Kia > Ferrari. I’m just bringing perspective to how it feels day to day there.
Where is the higher growth? I divided 2019 by 2009 GDP much earlier in the thread for the two countries we are talking about, and got a smaller number for Japan.
Don't accuse me of bad faith when you will not address this point. You keep telling me about higher or similar growth when the numbers do not support it.
As to the debt picture: it becomes more difficult to grow GDP to cover large debt when the working age population is destined to shrink relatively sharply. The demographic squeeze isn't a opinion or theory-- it is a certainty. Even liberalizing immigration policy would not be enough now, and there have only been the tiniest steps in that direction.
I would have been on the opposite side of this argument for a long time-- enthusiastic and optimistic for Japan's economics trends to improve, and a fan of many of the country's institutions. But at this point, there has been decades of underperformance-- yes, from a track to outpace the US's GDP on an absolute level to now being 2/3rds of it on a per-capita basis, with ongoing slower growth and terrible demographic trends.
The dependency ratio is going to be 0.79 people 65+ for every person 20-64 in 30 years, and the overall population will be 25% smaller. The working age population will be 33% smaller. This is a very difficult environment to have significant absolute growth in.
And, again, comparing to Germany is silly... because many of us are also concerned about the same factors-- underperforming growth, demographic shifts -- in Germany.
All I’ve claimed is at best you can say they are slightly below average for a first world nation, and still very high in absolute terms. To refute, you’d have to show that they are significantly lagging, not just a little as that’s not been my claim ever. It’s just not there. The hype is real.
> Please point out the Japan line which should by your argument be an even semi obvious outlier.
It's like you don't understand my main point: it is difficult to judge differences growth on a linear scale graph. It's like the dishonest COVID-19 graphs early on which showed coronavirus in comparison to other causes of death, and you couldn't see exponential growth it looked boring.
That's why sometimes it's useful to use a log scale, or to just divide the numbers and compare them, to understand rates of growth.
I think I see why we disagree: your entire argument is based on eyeballing (misleading, linear) graphs instead of comparing numbers. I have hit this point 4 times in the thread so far, and you keep making an argument based on eyeballing graphs.
Log scale is absolutely not the right measure, actually didn’t even see that nifty trick because I would never have expected it used! No wonder your graph looked totally wrong. Log scale would work if they were staying constant so we could compare on long time scales, but that’s so far from the case. If you can’t admit that, we can’t have a discussion. You really should know that to be talking about this stuff.
These are close values that are fluctuating too much. The swings over the last 10 years is relevant, in absolute values. I can write the numbers out for you, but the graphs are actually less refutable. You insinuate they aren’t, but they are they’re than numbers for this use: comparing relative performance. We want to see how they all are doing, in a straightforward comparison.
No, my point is you’re choosing your window very selectively and distorting the numbers to fit your narrative, and when I take the window away your point doesn’t stand, as it doesn’t
The premise and conclusion are wrong. You want to compare the whole picture not just growth form your arbitrary start at the peak of a mountain (your false framing). And you can just adjust them to the same Y axis, no need for log. We care about the marginal dollar.
You’re doing a lot of work avoiding looking at the graph I posted in earnest. It’s the right graph, and again you can’t choose an outlier.
I strongly disagree it's the right graph. I wonder if you're just trolling at this point. Comparing growth rates of countries by looking at absolute values of dollars from countries of different sizes is madness.
I've given you 5 different framings at this point:
* Real GDP PPP % change over 30, 20, and 10 years to the most recent fully reported year.
* Share of high-income country GDP over last 20 years
* Per capita PPP GDP over 30 years, where it slid from parity with Germany in 2005 to about 80% of Germany's.
But they're all bad in favor of looking at a linear scale graph, where starting from a higher value in the green series obscures that the percentage of growth is low compared to most of the members of the set.
If you're determined to believe a specific conclusion, there's not much point in discussion.
Of course it is. But that doesn't make the problems less real.
The demographic pressure cooker is still cooking-- a greater and greater proportion of national resources go to support an ever increasing fraction of the old, and stopping this is impossible at this point. Prospects for dating and marriage are collapsing for a large chunk of the populace. Government debt is increasing as a share of GDP and with the change in the dependency ratio and declining populace default looks increasingly likely in the long term.