Can massive government stimulus actually work?:The German Experience
- Thread starter Grandluxe
- Start date
average german worker is quite different to average us worker. In germany there is tradition from middleages for quality manufacturing and appreciate quality over quantity. Japan similar. Seem to be opposite in us.
thats why eu has global brands that did not evaporate with emergence of asia. and us has to resort to less glorious ways to keep afloat. Only thing from us that one can remember is jeans and possibly movies from up to '80.
thats why eu has global brands that did not evaporate with emergence of asia. and us has to resort to less glorious ways to keep afloat. Only thing from us that one can remember is jeans and possibly movies from up to '80.
Because you have 5 union construction workers running $12M worth of very modern equipment who can replace 300 guys with pickaxes and shovels.
That idiotic dolt Paul Krugman and the entire MSNBC staff just cannot absorb that factoid. That's why the original stimulus spent $287,000 for every job created.
I am not sure what you are trying to say? Are you blaming the Unions or technology? technological advancement progresses over time and I am sure during der Fuhrer's time, there were some industries like farming for example that were already automated or mechanized to a large degree. Surely the trick is to add stimulus in a targeted industry that works.
Technology has displaced Keynesian efficacy. In spades. This liberal utopian MSNBC/Krugman fantasy is just that - you cannot replicate Roosevelt's public works; the fact of the matter is that technology and productivity has displaced humanity doing repetitive and labor intensive tasks in any society where citizens earn more than $3K per year on average (the Chinese avg. factory worker's income). The first stimulus created jobs at a cost of $287,000 each. The way that Pelosi and Reid and Obama designed that package, all of the beneficiaries were either public service sector union employees, or union construction trades. Is that sustainable and effective policy ? Those weren't new jobs, either. It was simply financing the continuation of existing jobs.
Politicians cannot be tasked with picking winners and losers. Look at the absolutely nightmare of a shit show we have with the current administration doing that - hundreds of billions of dollars chasing green jobs that have been squandered by nearly all of those ventures going bankrupt (DoE projects in solar and wind especially), the NLRB denying Boeing fresh plant expansion in South Carolina because they were not union jobs, the list goes on and on.
Well every generation in history has its technological breakthroughs. I do not agree that targeted stimulus is necessarily inefficient. Singapore is a very good example of free market enterprise combined with government economic planning. It has been so successful it has been nicknamed the Singapore model in economics literature. Also,Roosevelt's public works was not as successful as HItler's. What lessons can we draw from the Fuhrer, an unemployment rate of 30% dropping to below 5% in under 4 years ?
"Extensive government intervention and planning, though not a rigid central plan, were essential to the successful expansion of both. Singapore's experience illustrates an approach to economic planning which admits possibilities other than just âthe marketâ or âthe planâ, and shows that this is not a polarised debate.
Analysis of the Singapore model points to a structuralist approach and leads away from a current neoclassical ascendency in development economics, founded âempiricallyâ in part on the Republic's success as one of the four East Asian dragons."
http://cje.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/6/735.abstract
Singapore's extraordinary "rags to riches" success story dramatically highlights the tremendous
potential of scientific and technological foresight planning.
Singapore has accomplished what may
be the most rapid and balanced rise to global socio-economic prominence ever.
Directed development
and incentives catapulted this tiny nation to world leadership positions in economic growth sectors
important to the future. Currently, this nation has consistently ranked among the
top five countries worldwide in terms of GDP per capita.
* Presented at Proteus Futures Academic Workshop, United States Army War College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania,
The largest economy in the world cannot follow the template of a small city-state from rags to riches, for many reasons, one of which is that we are not exactly rags to begin with.
The parallels to Nazi germany are also specious, Nazi Germany had price controls and government rationing for one reason. We are simply not going to do that. If I were to select a model to follow it would be that of West Germany after WWII, a free market success story. There are however again multiple reasons why that cannot be a template- most notably is the fact that the economy is now an advanced information intensive service economy in which the production no longer comes from ditch diggers.
However there is always something that most people, above all the so-called intellectuals, ignore. That is we don't have a country full of Germans, we have a country full of whiny underachievers. Most notably we have a huge population of non-German people who are hostile to very idea of learning and achieving. Economic wishful thinking like this has been tried ad naseum in places like Haiti, Zimbabwe, Mexico, etc. with predictable crappy results. You cannot make a people economically/technologically advanced by fiscal and monetary gaming, and you cannot divorce an economy from the culture of the people in it.
We will try I'm sure, and I'm sure it will fail just as the last 40 years of it has failed.
The parallels to Nazi germany are also specious, Nazi Germany had price controls and government rationing for one reason. We are simply not going to do that. If I were to select a model to follow it would be that of West Germany after WWII, a free market success story. There are however again multiple reasons why that cannot be a template- most notably is the fact that the economy is now an advanced information intensive service economy in which the production no longer comes from ditch diggers.
However there is always something that most people, above all the so-called intellectuals, ignore. That is we don't have a country full of Germans, we have a country full of whiny underachievers. Most notably we have a huge population of non-German people who are hostile to very idea of learning and achieving. Economic wishful thinking like this has been tried ad naseum in places like Haiti, Zimbabwe, Mexico, etc. with predictable crappy results. You cannot make a people economically/technologically advanced by fiscal and monetary gaming, and you cannot divorce an economy from the culture of the people in it.
We will try I'm sure, and I'm sure it will fail just as the last 40 years of it has failed.