Not sure food delivery would be as stimulating as express documents, but I have fond memories of my days as a bicycle courier. I'm sure it is just rosy retrospection, but if I only had the two options I would choose messenger over politician in an instant.
I often pitied the lobbyists and office workers. It was a carefree time.
The DoD used to hire Afghans who could speak English to train soldiers in certain scenarios.
Common instances of this included civil engineers in AFG who couldn’t get licensed here, that drove Uber and spent a few months training Americans somewhere in the Louisiana woods to make ends meet. Such a waste.
In IT the skills are very easy to transfer, it is an area where formal education and certification matter the least.
For doctors there is a path for getting board certifications, not easy but it is done a lot.
For lawyers there is no career transferability because law is the most heterogenous domain around the globe and expertise in a country is not applicable in other jurisdictions.
Most skilled labor like plumbers, electricians or constructions can transfer most of the knowledge, having to do adjustments for local practices and regulations. Not extremely easy, but doable.
My father had no trouble transferring his education into getting his PhD.
My mother's skills carried her to a doctorate in nursing
My uncle's medical skills carried over well enough for him to be an orthopedic surgeon
My aunt's carried well enough to run her own medical clinic in Norway
Do you think they're learning to count sticks or something to get their degrees in other countries? Why wouldn't thinks as internal as learned skills transfer?
Credentials might not map 1:1 but they're also backed by something... everything you learned to earn them
It's not transferable 1:1, some college / university are not even recognized abroad. I had a friend of mine from Thailand that couldn't get recognized her master degree in marketing in an European country.
So she enrolled again to go through the same stuff she learned just to get the valid degree spendable in the county
My comment is saying they're not transferable 1:1 right there...
Even between first world countries they're not transferable 1:1, even within single countries they're not transferable 1:1
But the reality is your friend had an incredible head start going over the same stuff she learned. There's this narrative that high educated people form 3rd world countries all have to end up in menial jobs because somehow a doctor/lawyer/engineer/tradesperson from a 3rd world country is not knowledgeable enough to do anything else by 1st world standards, and it's more of a meme than anything.
Head start in the uni maybe, not head start in life.
And also the program would be in a language that you never learned as first language and you don't even master it so yes, is not an head start at all to me.
Good thing a masters is part of university then...
The point is that other countries produce people just as capable at equivalent jobs, it literally said credentials don't map 1:1 but their actual backing, the knowledge, is real.
You don't know what a head start is, that's ok, but my point was not that complicated.
In many cases the qualifications are fraudulent, bestowed based on bribery or family connections. Those with legitimate qualifications can always re-complete the education in the new country.
Like many engineers (mechanical, nuclear, electrical etc) were doing low paid jobs in the west when the east block collapsed. I guess it's what it's, in this situations better be alive and have food on the table than struggling to meet end meals
This fails to mention that US plumbers were getting higher salaries than Russian engineers, or higher on average than most of people in the West.
In my small hometown in Russia, everybody can't get more amused that the best wage for immigrants there is paid by agricultural college diplomas.
The biggest mansions in the town are of: 1. local gang boss, 2. agronomists who went to US for work. (Russian agronomist salary was like 9000 roubles a month 15 years ago)
You also fail to mention that not everybody is driven by money. Russian engineer and scientist knew pretty well that they could get better life conditions in the US for example, yet they decided to live their life in Russia.
These are personal choice beyond what me or you think about, need to be respected.
So said, many researcher today are paid very little and they could get a better pay in private sector yet they don't bother to.
>> yet they decided to live their life in Russia.
These are personal choice
Really? Anyone who thinks that America, or anyone else, has any sort of open-door policy towards immigration is kidding themselves. Setting aside whether a Russian engineer would be allowed to leave Russia, the process of immigrating to another country is never easy. It costs money. Lots of it.
It was (and still is) lot easier if you're a scientist or a skilled worker.
> whether a Russian engineer would be allowed to leave Russia
Why not? I live in a country that is not US nor Russia and I know few very good Russian engineers. They worked in US too, some of them returned to Russia eventually. So I don't understand where you get your basis. People are allowed to leave Russia they're not trapped (not to mention the many I've met when traveling was allowed)
It's quite easy when you're an engineer with experience in a field in demand. Comparatively speaking. Leaving Russia was not so hard as long as you did the required amount of years and didn't work on anything sensitive, which if you wanted to leave you wouldn't go into anyways.
You fail to mention parity. I worked for $100/month 25 years ago and that was the average income in the country, a 2 room (1 bedroom, 1 living room) apartment in Bucharest was $8,000 (I bought one). Yes, nominally an US plumber was earning more, but his living condition were below mine at that time. I am taking my example because we used to be part of the Eastern Block, Russian engineers were earning a bit more.
Now with $3000/month ($36,000/year, before tax) you live pretty well in Bucharest, better than the plumber in US that is making the same or more.
In fact, that's more than the prime majority of bankers will ever see.
Computer science/coding seemed to have travelled the same trajectory before the stigma faded. A very in demand trade that nobody really wanted to do despite basics being available to many.
Back at home, people, including my parents, were categorically refusing to believe that starting salary of a banker could be as low as below $30k (per year) in US, or Canada.
That is after many spent their entire life savings, and sold their houses to give their children "business" eduction in the West.
The word "banker" is a homonym and you're using it in two different ways in your comment.
When people imagine bankers making a lot of money, they are talking about investment bankers. When people talk about bankers making $30k, they're talking about retail bankers.
These careers have nothing in common with each other. It's like comparing a McDonald's retail employee to a chemical engineer.
Remember that this guy already has had British citizenship, but he decided to immigrate to Germany despite the language barrier and not being a citizen.
Language is probably the biggest roadblock in getting a job in Germany and most people ignore it. German is not easy (my grandmother was a German teacher, some of my family members are of German descent and none of us is speaking any decent German) and Germans are more xenophobic than they will ever admit.
Even in my American company meetings with German people sometimes we have very awkward moments when the Germans switch from English to German mid-talks, even if they are peers or lower ranking than the non-German speakers in the discussion.
So Germans speaking their own language in their own country is now xenophobic? (referring to your first paragraph)
It‘s true that with the exception of big companies or certain industries much German is spoken at work. Exactly like Spanish in Spain, French in France, Italian in Italy or Portuguese in Portugal.
I‘m German myself, mostly living outside Germany. I try to fit in as good as possible, including making an effort to learn the local language. It would never cross my mind to think of a country as xenophobic because they speak their own language.
You understand that they're not saying Germans are xenophobic because they prefer a language, but that it was just a single example. That they are two separate concepts and one is just a small part of the other.
If I didn't know better I'd think you forced more of a connection than there was to build a strawman argument.
It‘s perfectly normal to use words like „and“ and still make an argument. This is done all the time in articles, it‘s not math but language. There was an assertion, then another assertion and then an example related (but not equal) to the first assertion. Sandwiching things like that can at best be called misleading, but I stand by my understanding which is that a connection between language and xenophobia was made. Other replies by the same person inside this thread confirm this as well („Germans that know English refusing to speak to people that only know English and Pashto is xenophobic.“) So he made a connection between language and xenophobia. Can we agree on this basic fact?
"This is language not math" is exactly my point, you're trying to paint this as me looking at a technicality or something, it's literally misconstruing someone's very simple words
They made a connection and it's not the connection you implied...
> It would never cross my mind to think of a country as xenophobic because they speak their own language.
This person never said Germany is xenophobic just because they speak their own language, it's insulting people's intelligence to pretend they did.
This isn't HN-style "haha got you on the mathematical sum of words" this is having the basic decency to reply to what was said, not what you're pretending was said. Maybe not everyone is capable of that.
Xenophobia has been an increasing concern in Europe in the last 10 years and nobody wants to admin it. There are "new-nazi" movement in Greece and Germany for example which of course target (not only but mostly) immigrants.
I guess is totally disconnected from the language discussion.
Golden Dawn in Greece and AFD in Germany (although it should be noted that AFD is not quite the same. GD would be equal to NPD or similar). Both have about 10% of the vote more or less to give you an idea of the size.
This is one of the most widely discussed political topics here and has been since at least 2013. I don‘t see how „nobody wants to admit it“.
The Green party was recently at 30% and is now at 18%. The social democrats + liberal + green party are currently at 53% - all decidedly not xenophobic. (source: sonntagsfrage.de)
The fact that a right-wing party exists is normal in a democracy. We should keep in mind that the Republican Party is in many ways more right-wing than AFD. And it‘s far bigger. The German conservative party is in many ways left of the Democratic party in the US. The social democrats and the Green party would be completely unthinkable there right now.
Left and moderate politician know the issue, I'm saying normal people and far right won't admit it because they think since they live in their small bubble the entire country is the same.
There has been immense pressure in the last years against immigrants in Europe and is true in every European country. Le Pen in France (21% in the last presidential election, 33% on the second turn vs Macron) and Salvini in Italy (Lega got 17% in the general election) are far right and xenophobic parties too. They won't admit it publicly, but they are not even taking the distance from whom in their party are racist as that helps them on getting votes.
No, Germans that know English refusing to speak to people that only know English and Pashto is xenophobic. I saw that many times in Germany (mostly in Munich), people refusing to talk to you in English even if they knew the language.
Can you please describe the situation? Are you saying someone asked a question in English and got a reply in German? Or are you saying there was an office with 20 German-speaking employees and one English speaking one and then much of the informal talk was in German? It‘s true, it‘s like that. And that‘s not xenophobic. It may be impolite, depending on the situation. It‘s not specific to Germany as anyone working in other places in Europe knows.
Some people don‘t talk English because they lack confidence.
Simplest example: my first time in Munich I was struggling with the subway instructions, they were all in German and this was before Internet on smartphones and Google translate, so at the entrance of the station I asked several people in English if they speak English and can tell me what ticket to purchase (the different ticket by area concept was completely foreign to me). A couple said yes, I asked the question "what ticket I need from here to X station" and the 2 answers were in the tone of :
- Read the instructions // - But they are in German // - Learn German.
If you go to Albania, where no foreigners speak the language, they will be happy to try to communicate in Italian (some people know it). Go in Romania, they will use whatever language they know (mostly English or German, but Italian, Spanish or French are not rare at all).
Everywhere in the Balkans people will try to communicate, same in Italy, France or Spain, not a problem at all in the Netherlands, Hungary, Czechia or Slovakia, no matter how bad they speak the language they will communicate with you. At the opposite side of the spectrum is Germany.
I travelled for work or vacations in all the countries in Europe except the Scandinavian Peninsula and Russia/Belarus/Ukraine, I never had a communication problem outside Germany. It almost makes me able to draw some conclusions from my personal experiences and the ones of many people that I know, including family and friends working in Germany for the past 30 years and for the 20 years of having work colleagues and one direct manager in Germany.
I am not saying Germans are bad, my best manager ever was a German moved to US, my current manager is a German in Frankfurt and he is a great guy, but the experience with the people on the street is that they don't want to speak English in many cases.
AFD got 3.4%. The conservative party got 25%. 28% combined and lumping them together is already too much.
> I travelled for work or vacations in all the countries in Europe […] I never had a communication problem outside Germany
Have you been in Spain outside of the touristic centers? How about France? Not everyone there speaks English and if I go there I try to adapt! I have struggled, I sometimes had to resort to another language, I sometimes couldn‘t communicate at all. But I make the effort because I‘m coming to their country whether on a vacation or for work. I don‘t go around complaining.
How it was in the past. How it is for many people in the presence (eg same language different country, acquired language country, inner country tourism, zero acquired language tourism).
There is a maybe top 10% (made up number) of the world population with a big enough budget and target country language capability to be in that situation. The rest does tourism most likely differently.
I’ve never had the problems you’re describing. I do know the first impressions are powerful (first impressions are why I don’t care much for Köln), but despite the xenophobic graffiti I’ve seen in Nürnberg and Bad Kissingen, despite the anecdotes I’ve heard from a Pakistani coworker, the closest my experiences get to “your German is no good so I will judge you” have been one rail official giving me a useless answer (and even then it wasn’t bad), and one business (legitimately) deciding I couldn’t manage one of their teams (not xenophobic! I agreed with them!), and I’ve cycled the Rhine from the Netherlands to Switzerland and visited Frankfurt (both of them), Köln, Hannover, Leipzig, Nürnberg, Suhl, Magdeburg, Heidelberg, and live in Berlin, an even despite living in Berlin my German language skills are still embarrassing.
@AdrianB1 (a reference to the CEFR score?) said “and” not “therefore”, so you shouldn’t be presuming there is intended to be a causal connection between those two things.
My general assumption when I looked for places to move to in response to Brexit was that people in one country are much the same as people in any other; as almost every nation is “more xenophobic than they will ever admit”[1]. I happen go think that Germany is far less xenophobic than most countries[2], while still being more xenophobic than it wants to admit.
Assuming the same distribution of personalities is also one reason why I picked Berlin over any tiny village somewhere, as my experience in the UK says London is more welcoming of outsiders than are random quiet British villages, and I applied this pattern everywhere. Former coworker from Pakistan confirmed this hypothesis with stories from his experiences in other parts of Germany.
I’m looking forward to this pandemic being over so I can do meatspace language lessons instead of relying on apps and websites.
[1] for example, the UK has many loud people who refuse to accept they’re xenophobic while saying the country has too many Muslims (and then the Mosque they’re complaining about turns out to be a Catholic cathedral or a former Royal palace). Likewise apologists for the British empire. I even knew someone whose response to asylum seekers causing the Eurostar being delayed one time was to suggest the government would make the next train drive through anyone on the line, as if late trains were not a standard part of modern Britain (I no longer talk to this person).
I would be surprised if this was uniquely a British delusion, or if any other nation managed to avoid it, and the nature of the graffiti I saw outside the Bad Kissingen train station, and on political posters in Nürnberg (a city, but I’m not saying all racists live in the countryside), certainly indicate that it is similar.
[2] e.g. opinion polls showing high level of public support for more asylum seekers.
I would separate the topic of language and xenophobia. The language is hard and acceptance to speak English - while generally there - is not universal. However, the bubble of non English speakers, the bubble of xenophobic people and bubble of racists in Germany have not the biggest overlaps.
Native languages in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japanese or China have a very long history and the countries are very confident of themselves. A German thinks: you are here so you should speak German. Maybe I am nice and talk English to you, but I expect you to learn German if you are here. The French are even stricter on that.
They should but they do not need to. But we are talking here about some individuals being declared xenophobic because they did not want to speak English inside of Germany despite having English language capability.
Germany is very welcome to tourists, but we are 80 million country where tourism is a tiny fraction of our GDP. We are not Mallorca, Ibiza or the Bahamas. There cannot be an expectation that as a tourist you have an easy way there.
I order food just about every second day, with a lot of it being delivered by 'lieferando' people.
This used to be mostly young people: think students and high schoolers. But lately I've been greeting mostly people looking to be 40-50 at the door. I've been getting used to it but the first few times I was surprised.
I think this is the motivation behind the article: People aren't expecting anyone older than say 25 to do this job, much less the former minister of a country, but I suppose times are changing.
Let's hope this equates to better pay. High schoolers who get rotated out every six month won't exactly be the best at negotiating or even think of unionization efforts.
> Let's hope this equates to better pay. High schoolers who get rotated out every six month won't exactly be the best at negotiating or even think of unionization efforts.
I am not optimistic. Will the older immigrants (from many different countries) who don't speak German well, don't have connections, don't really know their rights, and don't have any other options be better at negotiating and unionizing?
>>High schoolers who get rotated out every six month won't exactly be the best at negotiating or even think of unionization efforts.
Artificially raising pay above market rates leads to higher consumer prices, and massive deadweight loss from greater unrealized production/earnings.
Between 1870 and 1900, when there was no minimum wage, or labor regulations to empower unions, US wages doubled in inflation-adjusted terms, while US industry expanded and became financially healthier.
This was very much unlike the post-war period, where US industry was running on borrowed time, making increasingly burdensome concessions to unions that led to huge bankruptcies and retrenchment in the 1970s in many industries.
A better explanation of the growth from 1870 to 1900 is the Second Industrial Revolution[1]. This was a short period of massive changes to logistics (better railways), society (electric lights improved factory productivity), and what was even possible to make (improved materials and precision machining). Labor only comes into the story because less labor was needed to make things. Wages went up because productivity shot up.
I would be more convinced if you showed two similar nations who had very different outcomes during the 1870s to 1900s because of wages.
>>This was a short period of massive changes to logistics (better railways), society (electric lights improved factory productivity), and what was even possible to make (improved materials and precision machining).
There have been just as many opportunities to raise productivity in modern times, with the development of computerized production, internet communication, robotics, rocketry and space-based industries, plastics, the standardized shipping container, nanotechnology, biotechnology, machine learning, distributed blockchains, etc
Nations like Hong Kong and Singapore, which maintained comparatively free-market oriented economies, and ranked number 1 and 2 in the Economic Freedom Index for decades, vastly outperformed more social democratic economies.
They not only saw vastly greater economic and wage growth, but closed the huge deficit they had with Western nations in life expectancy in 1960, and eventually surpassed them. HK and Singapore today have a higher life expectancy than even the Scandinavian countries, which in 1960 were #1, 2 and 3.
Beyond these anecdotes, you can look at basic correlations found in large datasets covering dozens of economies over a span of decades, which suggest lower government spending, as a percentage of GDP, tends to be beneficial to economic performance:
The changes in productivity due to computers, robotics etc. are probably closer in economic impact to the first industrial revolution than the second.
The second industrial revolution increased demand for labor, raising wages. The first vastly decreased demand for labor, leading to falling wages, increasing inequality and social unrest.
All productivity enhancing technology, whether those that emerged in the first industrial revolution, second industrial revolution or information technology revolution, reduce the amount of labor required to do a task, and thereby increase how much the population as a whole produces, leading to wages increasing.
The decline in wage growth since the 1970s does not appear to be due to any special properties of more recent technological innovations, given countries like Hong Kong and Singapore, which were more restrained in their growth of labor regulations and taxation, saw massive wage growth into the 21st century.
It appears simply to be due to a huge transition to social democracy:
Which has resulted in a larger portion of economic output being directed by coercive non-market forces, which are less efficient than the consumer-directed allocation of resources caused by market forces.
It took over a century for the median wage in Great Britain to return to pre-industrial levels after the first industrial revolution.
> reduce the amount of labor required to do a task... leading to wages increasing.
I'm not aware of this "reduced demand leads to increased prices" economic theory. Can you tell me where I can read more about it? Great Britian increased it's total output while wages fell dramatically. I'm not sure your point is supported by evidence here.
How appicable are the stories of Hong Kong and Singapore to countries that aren't single cities that occupy unique geopolitical positions? Hong Kong is no longer a country. Surely this is a property of unique relationship with China. Surely many other characterisitics of Hong Kong are related to it's relationship with China.
>>It took over a century for the median wage in Great Britain to return to pre-industrial levels after the first industrial revolution.
I don't know what you're referring to, as all the graphs I've seen have shown a general upward trend in UK wages over the last three centuries. Maybe you could provide a source. What I do know is that per capita productivity, which is almost entirely a function of labor saving innovation, is strongly correlated with average and median wages, and is widely established to be the primary determinant of per capita income.
>>I'm not aware of this "reduced demand leads to increased prices" economic theory. Can you tell me where I can read more about it?
It doesn't reduce demand. It increases demand. Demand, in economics, is defined as purchasing power intent on consumption. As productivity increases, so does production, and with it real (inflation-adjusted) spending, as people having more goods/services with which to bid on scarce resources like labor.
Here's an explanation for how automation raises wages:
This argument that unions somehow "artificially" increase prices doesn't hold water for a second under scrutiny.
In a free market you can see unions as an actor who sells labor. They're not opposed to a free market at all - they merely even the playing field at the negotiating table and generally make the process smoother.
You only have a problem when unions achieve a monopoly position and abuse it - same as with any other kind of actor in a free market.
>>they merely even the playing field at the negotiating table and generally make the process smoother.
The negotiating table is completely even in a free market, i.e. a society where contract liberty is intact.
For example, it's irrelevant to my negotiation with Apple that Apple is worth $2.4 trillion. It can't force me to buy Apple products. Once the free-market ruleset is undermined, then Apple can, through taxing authorities and regulatory gatekeepers and the armed government agents that enforce their taxes and restrictions, force me to buy its products.
The free market ruleset protects our most basic rights, and is the most important institution for protecting the weak from the strong. That you believe otherwise is a deliberate outcome by those who want to abolish those safeguards.
Labor unions are one such organization that wants you to believe otherwise. The wage gains they get their members is not a result of them "even[ing] the playing field at the negotiating table". It's a result of the government MANDATING, on their behalf, that the employer collectively bargain with them, i.e. prohibiting the employer from negotiating with any party other than the union.
This blatantly violates the free market principle of all parties having contract liberty, and allows the union to blackmail the employer into paying above market wages via the threat of striking.
> > It's a result of the government MANDATING, on their behalf, that the employer collectively bargain with them, i.e. prohibiting the employer from negotiating with any party other than the union.
You can have unions without the government mandating anything. This is a total straw man.
Here's an example: I know I'm worth considerably more to my employer than they're paying me, but were I to ask for appropriate compensation they'd rather let me go than pay up - because it would set a bad precedent. Any other employer I could turn to would do the same.
So I can't demand that compensation because unlike corporations I need to eat. And you're going to tell me this kind of situation isn't an asymmetrical power dynamic? The corporation can chalk it up as a strategic loss and survive, I can't. The "war chests" here are so disproportionally unbalanced it isn't even funny.
It would be a different picture if most people they could replace me with (if they even find anyone) would negotiate 'properly'. But people don't - it doesn't make sense for any individual.
Hence, unions.
Also you bringing up the situation of unions in the US is nice and all, but this article is about Germany. You might want to research the situation there and reevaluate.
>>You can have unions without the government mandating anything.
Unions have no power in a free market, which is why unionization rates were so low until the unions successfully hoodwinked society into believing their victim narrative, and had the government pass laws in their favor.
>>Here's an example: I know I'm worth considerably more to my employer than they're paying me, but were I to ask for appropriate compensation they'd rather let me go than pay up - because it would set a bad precedent. Any other employer I could turn to would do the same.
Or they could pay you more and require that you to not disclose your pay raise to co-workers.
If they don't pay market wages, their employees will resign to work for companies that do. There's no trick that companies can use to avoid paying market wages.
Supply and demand are the dominant forces in determining wage levels, as centuries of empirical evidence shows. The free market is quite efficient, and as a consequence, laws that violate it typically reduce efficiency.
EDIT, being rate limited so will respond to the below here:
>>There's also no such thing as laws forcing employers to negotiate with unions
Collective bargaining laws do precisely this. In the US, if the majority of a work unit votes to unionize, the company employing them MUST engage in collective bargaining with the entire work unit, and cannot fire them and replace them with workers who are not unionized.
This basic violation of contract liberty is characterized by mainstream academia and so-called civil liberties organizations like the ACLU, in Orwellian fashion, as a human right, and has become institutionalized around the world.
>>Because I've got a history book full of examples that say otherwise - of unions/guilds mattering even when facing opposition from the government.
The power of guilds came entirely from government! The defining characteristic of a guild was an association of market providers who were granted, by government authorities, a market monopoly, to the exclusion of market providers not party to the guild.
> Unions have no power in a free market, which is why unionization rates were so low until the unions successfully hoodwinked society into believing their victim narrative, and had the government pass laws in their favor.
Unions have been outlawed (or taken over by the state) at several points in German history. Nowadays guilds and unions don't enjoy many special protections except for such things as the basic right of people to form associations: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_9.html
There's also no such thing as laws forcing employers to negotiate with unions. Employees who aren't part of the union in question are not subject to agreements negotiated between employer and unions: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tvg/__3.html
Also about "Unions have no power in a free market"... do you really stand by that statement? Because I've got a history book full of examples that say otherwise - of unions/guilds mattering even when facing opposition from the government.
This is a common misconception I have when discussing unions with US people. They are generally familiar with things like airline, police, or teachers unions where all employees are required to be members of that one specific union. That’s not generally how it works in European countries.
> This was very much unlike the post-war period, where US industry was running on borrowed time, making increasingly burdensome concessions to unions that led to huge bankruptcies and retrenchment in the 1970s in many industries.
You mean the adjustment from the post-war period of 1945-1975? Just like the one you referenced from 1870-1900? The post-war boom in wages here, that you can see many times in history, occurs due to demographics. You are essentially arguing to the contrary of your point, that large-scale wage increases for average people translate to better outcomes for all. Higher velocity of money, more innovation. You do realize that society as a whole is a large union, correct? And if suddenly there are far less people for work, then it has the same effect as a group holding out for higher wages? That is functionally what a strike is; it's as if a large portion of the young population is all striking at once (they're in fact dead).
> massive deadweight loss from greater unrealized production/earnings
And what does this deadweight loss thing mean exactly... coming from someone who studied economics? This is completely made up, more casual libertarian groupthink from people who got rich and conveniently stop believing in society. Can we stay grounded on this board please?
>>You mean the adjustment from the post-war period of 1945-1975? Just like the one you referenced from 1870-1900?
I just explained that the 1945-1975 period was not the same as the 1870-1900 period. The latter was associated with massive gains in the market position of US industry. The former was associated with the degradation of the market position of major US industrial firms, making those wage gains unsustainable.
>>The post-war boom in wages here, that you can see many times in history, occurs due to demographics.
Why would demographics cause the post-war boom? I see you reference death ("they're in fact dead"), which I take to mean you are implying that WW2 caused a large enough decline in the working age population so as to explain the large post-war wage gains, but 420,000 military deaths out of a total US population of 139 million in 1945, cannot explain the magnitude of wage growth in the post-war period.
>>And what does this deadweight loss thing mean exactly... coming from someone who studied economics?
This is the Wikipedia page defining the term if you're unfamiliar with it:
It's a basic economics term, and has nothing to do with "casual libertarian groupthink".
Maybe you should assume good faith and debate on the merits of the arguments, instead of caricaturing me as a member of some group of libertarians "who got rich and conveniently stop believing in society". These kinds of comments are NOT grounded.
An MP or elected official doesn't necessarily mean that much in many places. Even in wealthy nations, a lot of elected officials are basically just citizens who one way or another ran for office and found themselves elected.
MP's are often voted in on the basis of their party, not their personal stature. So the 'selection criteria' is really one of the party more than the voting public, and often filters are vague, often with write-in candidates in many ridings where a loss might be expected.
Even more so for a less developed country.
That said, I very much appreciate this man's attitude - a 'job is a job' and we should all be so lucky to have one, and there's nothing remotely demeaning about delivering food.
The real issue is one of appropriate compensation i.e. making sure that people are paid well enough for their contributions.
One thing about this kind of work is that it's definitely material: every delivered meal is a delivered meal. White collar workers, where there's a ton of slack and lack of efficiency cannot always say that their contributions have mattered, although it's a complicated story there as well.
> People aren't expecting anyone older than say 25 to do this job, much less the former minister of a country
You are assuming a students or high schooler isn't more qualified to do the job of a "minister" of, what appeared to be, an artificial "government" that tried to syphon as much money in it's own pockets as possible.
a movie about similar situation "House of Sand and Fog" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0315983/ . The US where the movie is set of course isn't Germany, it is more socially stratified and the "job is a job" is much less applicable here.
Too bad the article was a fluff piece. There could have been a lot more depth to the story, the value of health, of not being motivated by position or title, of keeping yourself mentally and physically busy as one works through a transition.
One thing the article only hints at is he doesn’t speak German! Of course he couldn’t find a job in Germany.
I think this guy is going to be OK. He knows how to market himself at least.
Well, at least this speaks well of him not having been a corrupt minister who stole whatever funds he could during his tenure and stashed them in portable or overseas wealth. I'd find it hard to believe him fleeing to Europe with much money and then deciding to work as a courier just for kicks or cover.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadI often pitied the lobbyists and office workers. It was a carefree time.
Common instances of this included civil engineers in AFG who couldn’t get licensed here, that drove Uber and spent a few months training Americans somewhere in the Louisiana woods to make ends meet. Such a waste.
Welcome to reality of 3rd world immigrants to the West. Near complete untransferabbility of career, skills, and credentials.
For doctors there is a path for getting board certifications, not easy but it is done a lot.
For lawyers there is no career transferability because law is the most heterogenous domain around the globe and expertise in a country is not applicable in other jurisdictions.
Most skilled labor like plumbers, electricians or constructions can transfer most of the knowledge, having to do adjustments for local practices and regulations. Not extremely easy, but doable.
My mother's skills carried her to a doctorate in nursing
My uncle's medical skills carried over well enough for him to be an orthopedic surgeon
My aunt's carried well enough to run her own medical clinic in Norway
Do you think they're learning to count sticks or something to get their degrees in other countries? Why wouldn't thinks as internal as learned skills transfer?
Credentials might not map 1:1 but they're also backed by something... everything you learned to earn them
So she enrolled again to go through the same stuff she learned just to get the valid degree spendable in the county
Even between first world countries they're not transferable 1:1, even within single countries they're not transferable 1:1
But the reality is your friend had an incredible head start going over the same stuff she learned. There's this narrative that high educated people form 3rd world countries all have to end up in menial jobs because somehow a doctor/lawyer/engineer/tradesperson from a 3rd world country is not knowledgeable enough to do anything else by 1st world standards, and it's more of a meme than anything.
I wouldn't consider an head start to do again your degree once you've done it already in your home country
Do you know what a head start is?
And also the program would be in a language that you never learned as first language and you don't even master it so yes, is not an head start at all to me.
The point is that other countries produce people just as capable at equivalent jobs, it literally said credentials don't map 1:1 but their actual backing, the knowledge, is real.
You don't know what a head start is, that's ok, but my point was not that complicated.
This fails to mention that US plumbers were getting higher salaries than Russian engineers, or higher on average than most of people in the West.
In my small hometown in Russia, everybody can't get more amused that the best wage for immigrants there is paid by agricultural college diplomas.
The biggest mansions in the town are of: 1. local gang boss, 2. agronomists who went to US for work. (Russian agronomist salary was like 9000 roubles a month 15 years ago)
These are personal choice beyond what me or you think about, need to be respected.
So said, many researcher today are paid very little and they could get a better pay in private sector yet they don't bother to.
Really? Anyone who thinks that America, or anyone else, has any sort of open-door policy towards immigration is kidding themselves. Setting aside whether a Russian engineer would be allowed to leave Russia, the process of immigrating to another country is never easy. It costs money. Lots of it.
> whether a Russian engineer would be allowed to leave Russia
Why not? I live in a country that is not US nor Russia and I know few very good Russian engineers. They worked in US too, some of them returned to Russia eventually. So I don't understand where you get your basis. People are allowed to leave Russia they're not trapped (not to mention the many I've met when traveling was allowed)
Convenient decision when the KGB has the location of all your extended family in it's database!
Now with $3000/month ($36,000/year, before tax) you live pretty well in Bucharest, better than the plumber in US that is making the same or more.
Computer science/coding seemed to have travelled the same trajectory before the stigma faded. A very in demand trade that nobody really wanted to do despite basics being available to many.
Back at home, people, including my parents, were categorically refusing to believe that starting salary of a banker could be as low as below $30k (per year) in US, or Canada.
That is after many spent their entire life savings, and sold their houses to give their children "business" eduction in the West.
When people imagine bankers making a lot of money, they are talking about investment bankers. When people talk about bankers making $30k, they're talking about retail bankers.
These careers have nothing in common with each other. It's like comparing a McDonald's retail employee to a chemical engineer.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-18/junior-ba...
And that's also a niche of the bankers, not everyone of them are ending up on top banks.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56452494
Even in my American company meetings with German people sometimes we have very awkward moments when the Germans switch from English to German mid-talks, even if they are peers or lower ranking than the non-German speakers in the discussion.
It‘s true that with the exception of big companies or certain industries much German is spoken at work. Exactly like Spanish in Spain, French in France, Italian in Italy or Portuguese in Portugal.
I‘m German myself, mostly living outside Germany. I try to fit in as good as possible, including making an effort to learn the local language. It would never cross my mind to think of a country as xenophobic because they speak their own language.
- Knowing German is important
- Germans are more xenophobic than they care to admit
Why are you forcing them to be one then attacking that false premise?
You understand that they're not saying Germans are xenophobic because they prefer a language, but that it was just a single example. That they are two separate concepts and one is just a small part of the other.
If I didn't know better I'd think you forced more of a connection than there was to build a strawman argument.
They made a connection and it's not the connection you implied...
> It would never cross my mind to think of a country as xenophobic because they speak their own language.
This person never said Germany is xenophobic just because they speak their own language, it's insulting people's intelligence to pretend they did.
This isn't HN-style "haha got you on the mathematical sum of words" this is having the basic decency to reply to what was said, not what you're pretending was said. Maybe not everyone is capable of that.
I guess is totally disconnected from the language discussion.
This is one of the most widely discussed political topics here and has been since at least 2013. I don‘t see how „nobody wants to admit it“.
The Green party was recently at 30% and is now at 18%. The social democrats + liberal + green party are currently at 53% - all decidedly not xenophobic. (source: sonntagsfrage.de)
The fact that a right-wing party exists is normal in a democracy. We should keep in mind that the Republican Party is in many ways more right-wing than AFD. And it‘s far bigger. The German conservative party is in many ways left of the Democratic party in the US. The social democrats and the Green party would be completely unthinkable there right now.
(I‘m voting for the Green party.)
There has been immense pressure in the last years against immigrants in Europe and is true in every European country. Le Pen in France (21% in the last presidential election, 33% on the second turn vs Macron) and Salvini in Italy (Lega got 17% in the general election) are far right and xenophobic parties too. They won't admit it publicly, but they are not even taking the distance from whom in their party are racist as that helps them on getting votes.
Some people don‘t talk English because they lack confidence.
If you go to Albania, where no foreigners speak the language, they will be happy to try to communicate in Italian (some people know it). Go in Romania, they will use whatever language they know (mostly English or German, but Italian, Spanish or French are not rare at all).
Everywhere in the Balkans people will try to communicate, same in Italy, France or Spain, not a problem at all in the Netherlands, Hungary, Czechia or Slovakia, no matter how bad they speak the language they will communicate with you. At the opposite side of the spectrum is Germany.
I travelled for work or vacations in all the countries in Europe except the Scandinavian Peninsula and Russia/Belarus/Ukraine, I never had a communication problem outside Germany. It almost makes me able to draw some conclusions from my personal experiences and the ones of many people that I know, including family and friends working in Germany for the past 30 years and for the 20 years of having work colleagues and one direct manager in Germany.
I am not saying Germans are bad, my best manager ever was a German moved to US, my current manager is a German in Frankfurt and he is a great guy, but the experience with the people on the street is that they don't want to speak English in many cases.
It‘s possible that you asked someone who chose to be a ****. But most people there are helpful.
Here is the communal election 2020: https://www.wahlen-muenchen.de/ergebnisse/20200315stadtratsw...
AFD got 3.4%. The conservative party got 25%. 28% combined and lumping them together is already too much.
> I travelled for work or vacations in all the countries in Europe […] I never had a communication problem outside Germany
Have you been in Spain outside of the touristic centers? How about France? Not everyone there speaks English and if I go there I try to adapt! I have struggled, I sometimes had to resort to another language, I sometimes couldn‘t communicate at all. But I make the effort because I‘m coming to their country whether on a vacation or for work. I don‘t go around complaining.
Aside of that: it is rude and I polite but not xenophobic. They can rightfully expect that you speak the language of the country you are in.
There is a maybe top 10% (made up number) of the world population with a big enough budget and target country language capability to be in that situation. The rest does tourism most likely differently.
My general assumption when I looked for places to move to in response to Brexit was that people in one country are much the same as people in any other; as almost every nation is “more xenophobic than they will ever admit”[1]. I happen go think that Germany is far less xenophobic than most countries[2], while still being more xenophobic than it wants to admit.
Assuming the same distribution of personalities is also one reason why I picked Berlin over any tiny village somewhere, as my experience in the UK says London is more welcoming of outsiders than are random quiet British villages, and I applied this pattern everywhere. Former coworker from Pakistan confirmed this hypothesis with stories from his experiences in other parts of Germany.
I’m looking forward to this pandemic being over so I can do meatspace language lessons instead of relying on apps and websites.
[1] for example, the UK has many loud people who refuse to accept they’re xenophobic while saying the country has too many Muslims (and then the Mosque they’re complaining about turns out to be a Catholic cathedral or a former Royal palace). Likewise apologists for the British empire. I even knew someone whose response to asylum seekers causing the Eurostar being delayed one time was to suggest the government would make the next train drive through anyone on the line, as if late trains were not a standard part of modern Britain (I no longer talk to this person).
I would be surprised if this was uniquely a British delusion, or if any other nation managed to avoid it, and the nature of the graffiti I saw outside the Bad Kissingen train station, and on political posters in Nürnberg (a city, but I’m not saying all racists live in the countryside), certainly indicate that it is similar.
[2] e.g. opinion polls showing high level of public support for more asylum seekers.
How dare they speak their language!? Well, they can't really speak English either, because that would be cultural appropriation.
Native languages in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japanese or China have a very long history and the countries are very confident of themselves. A German thinks: you are here so you should speak German. Maybe I am nice and talk English to you, but I expect you to learn German if you are here. The French are even stricter on that.
Germany is very welcome to tourists, but we are 80 million country where tourism is a tiny fraction of our GDP. We are not Mallorca, Ibiza or the Bahamas. There cannot be an expectation that as a tourist you have an easy way there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Seems logical to me. The UK is at the start of a lost generation.
This used to be mostly young people: think students and high schoolers. But lately I've been greeting mostly people looking to be 40-50 at the door. I've been getting used to it but the first few times I was surprised.
I think this is the motivation behind the article: People aren't expecting anyone older than say 25 to do this job, much less the former minister of a country, but I suppose times are changing.
Let's hope this equates to better pay. High schoolers who get rotated out every six month won't exactly be the best at negotiating or even think of unionization efforts.
I am not optimistic. Will the older immigrants (from many different countries) who don't speak German well, don't have connections, don't really know their rights, and don't have any other options be better at negotiating and unionizing?
Artificially raising pay above market rates leads to higher consumer prices, and massive deadweight loss from greater unrealized production/earnings.
Between 1870 and 1900, when there was no minimum wage, or labor regulations to empower unions, US wages doubled in inflation-adjusted terms, while US industry expanded and became financially healthier.
This was very much unlike the post-war period, where US industry was running on borrowed time, making increasingly burdensome concessions to unions that led to huge bankruptcies and retrenchment in the 1970s in many industries.
I would be more convinced if you showed two similar nations who had very different outcomes during the 1870s to 1900s because of wages.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Industrial_Revolution
There have been just as many opportunities to raise productivity in modern times, with the development of computerized production, internet communication, robotics, rocketry and space-based industries, plastics, the standardized shipping container, nanotechnology, biotechnology, machine learning, distributed blockchains, etc
Nations like Hong Kong and Singapore, which maintained comparatively free-market oriented economies, and ranked number 1 and 2 in the Economic Freedom Index for decades, vastly outperformed more social democratic economies.
They not only saw vastly greater economic and wage growth, but closed the huge deficit they had with Western nations in life expectancy in 1960, and eventually surpassed them. HK and Singapore today have a higher life expectancy than even the Scandinavian countries, which in 1960 were #1, 2 and 3.
Beyond these anecdotes, you can look at basic correlations found in large datasets covering dozens of economies over a span of decades, which suggest lower government spending, as a percentage of GDP, tends to be beneficial to economic performance:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170821004405/http://ime.bg/upl...
The second industrial revolution increased demand for labor, raising wages. The first vastly decreased demand for labor, leading to falling wages, increasing inequality and social unrest.
The decline in wage growth since the 1970s does not appear to be due to any special properties of more recent technological innovations, given countries like Hong Kong and Singapore, which were more restrained in their growth of labor regulations and taxation, saw massive wage growth into the 21st century.
It appears simply to be due to a huge transition to social democracy:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
Which has resulted in a larger portion of economic output being directed by coercive non-market forces, which are less efficient than the consumer-directed allocation of resources caused by market forces.
> reduce the amount of labor required to do a task... leading to wages increasing.
I'm not aware of this "reduced demand leads to increased prices" economic theory. Can you tell me where I can read more about it? Great Britian increased it's total output while wages fell dramatically. I'm not sure your point is supported by evidence here.
How appicable are the stories of Hong Kong and Singapore to countries that aren't single cities that occupy unique geopolitical positions? Hong Kong is no longer a country. Surely this is a property of unique relationship with China. Surely many other characterisitics of Hong Kong are related to it's relationship with China.
I don't know what you're referring to, as all the graphs I've seen have shown a general upward trend in UK wages over the last three centuries. Maybe you could provide a source. What I do know is that per capita productivity, which is almost entirely a function of labor saving innovation, is strongly correlated with average and median wages, and is widely established to be the primary determinant of per capita income.
>>I'm not aware of this "reduced demand leads to increased prices" economic theory. Can you tell me where I can read more about it?
It doesn't reduce demand. It increases demand. Demand, in economics, is defined as purchasing power intent on consumption. As productivity increases, so does production, and with it real (inflation-adjusted) spending, as people having more goods/services with which to bid on scarce resources like labor.
Here's an explanation for how automation raises wages:
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddit...
In a free market you can see unions as an actor who sells labor. They're not opposed to a free market at all - they merely even the playing field at the negotiating table and generally make the process smoother.
You only have a problem when unions achieve a monopoly position and abuse it - same as with any other kind of actor in a free market.
The negotiating table is completely even in a free market, i.e. a society where contract liberty is intact.
For example, it's irrelevant to my negotiation with Apple that Apple is worth $2.4 trillion. It can't force me to buy Apple products. Once the free-market ruleset is undermined, then Apple can, through taxing authorities and regulatory gatekeepers and the armed government agents that enforce their taxes and restrictions, force me to buy its products.
The free market ruleset protects our most basic rights, and is the most important institution for protecting the weak from the strong. That you believe otherwise is a deliberate outcome by those who want to abolish those safeguards.
Labor unions are one such organization that wants you to believe otherwise. The wage gains they get their members is not a result of them "even[ing] the playing field at the negotiating table". It's a result of the government MANDATING, on their behalf, that the employer collectively bargain with them, i.e. prohibiting the employer from negotiating with any party other than the union.
This blatantly violates the free market principle of all parties having contract liberty, and allows the union to blackmail the employer into paying above market wages via the threat of striking.
You can have unions without the government mandating anything. This is a total straw man.
Here's an example: I know I'm worth considerably more to my employer than they're paying me, but were I to ask for appropriate compensation they'd rather let me go than pay up - because it would set a bad precedent. Any other employer I could turn to would do the same.
So I can't demand that compensation because unlike corporations I need to eat. And you're going to tell me this kind of situation isn't an asymmetrical power dynamic? The corporation can chalk it up as a strategic loss and survive, I can't. The "war chests" here are so disproportionally unbalanced it isn't even funny.
It would be a different picture if most people they could replace me with (if they even find anyone) would negotiate 'properly'. But people don't - it doesn't make sense for any individual.
Hence, unions.
Also you bringing up the situation of unions in the US is nice and all, but this article is about Germany. You might want to research the situation there and reevaluate.
Unions have no power in a free market, which is why unionization rates were so low until the unions successfully hoodwinked society into believing their victim narrative, and had the government pass laws in their favor.
>>Here's an example: I know I'm worth considerably more to my employer than they're paying me, but were I to ask for appropriate compensation they'd rather let me go than pay up - because it would set a bad precedent. Any other employer I could turn to would do the same.
Or they could pay you more and require that you to not disclose your pay raise to co-workers.
If they don't pay market wages, their employees will resign to work for companies that do. There's no trick that companies can use to avoid paying market wages.
Supply and demand are the dominant forces in determining wage levels, as centuries of empirical evidence shows. The free market is quite efficient, and as a consequence, laws that violate it typically reduce efficiency.
EDIT, being rate limited so will respond to the below here:
>>There's also no such thing as laws forcing employers to negotiate with unions
Collective bargaining laws do precisely this. In the US, if the majority of a work unit votes to unionize, the company employing them MUST engage in collective bargaining with the entire work unit, and cannot fire them and replace them with workers who are not unionized.
This basic violation of contract liberty is characterized by mainstream academia and so-called civil liberties organizations like the ACLU, in Orwellian fashion, as a human right, and has become institutionalized around the world.
>>Because I've got a history book full of examples that say otherwise - of unions/guilds mattering even when facing opposition from the government.
The power of guilds came entirely from government! The defining characteristic of a guild was an association of market providers who were granted, by government authorities, a market monopoly, to the exclusion of market providers not party to the guild.
Unions have been outlawed (or taken over by the state) at several points in German history. Nowadays guilds and unions don't enjoy many special protections except for such things as the basic right of people to form associations: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_9.html
There's also no such thing as laws forcing employers to negotiate with unions. Employees who aren't part of the union in question are not subject to agreements negotiated between employer and unions: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tvg/__3.html
Also about "Unions have no power in a free market"... do you really stand by that statement? Because I've got a history book full of examples that say otherwise - of unions/guilds mattering even when facing opposition from the government.
You mean the adjustment from the post-war period of 1945-1975? Just like the one you referenced from 1870-1900? The post-war boom in wages here, that you can see many times in history, occurs due to demographics. You are essentially arguing to the contrary of your point, that large-scale wage increases for average people translate to better outcomes for all. Higher velocity of money, more innovation. You do realize that society as a whole is a large union, correct? And if suddenly there are far less people for work, then it has the same effect as a group holding out for higher wages? That is functionally what a strike is; it's as if a large portion of the young population is all striking at once (they're in fact dead).
> massive deadweight loss from greater unrealized production/earnings
And what does this deadweight loss thing mean exactly... coming from someone who studied economics? This is completely made up, more casual libertarian groupthink from people who got rich and conveniently stop believing in society. Can we stay grounded on this board please?
I just explained that the 1945-1975 period was not the same as the 1870-1900 period. The latter was associated with massive gains in the market position of US industry. The former was associated with the degradation of the market position of major US industrial firms, making those wage gains unsustainable.
>>The post-war boom in wages here, that you can see many times in history, occurs due to demographics.
Why would demographics cause the post-war boom? I see you reference death ("they're in fact dead"), which I take to mean you are implying that WW2 caused a large enough decline in the working age population so as to explain the large post-war wage gains, but 420,000 military deaths out of a total US population of 139 million in 1945, cannot explain the magnitude of wage growth in the post-war period.
>>And what does this deadweight loss thing mean exactly... coming from someone who studied economics?
This is the Wikipedia page defining the term if you're unfamiliar with it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss
It's a basic economics term, and has nothing to do with "casual libertarian groupthink".
Maybe you should assume good faith and debate on the merits of the arguments, instead of caricaturing me as a member of some group of libertarians "who got rich and conveniently stop believing in society". These kinds of comments are NOT grounded.
An MP or elected official doesn't necessarily mean that much in many places. Even in wealthy nations, a lot of elected officials are basically just citizens who one way or another ran for office and found themselves elected.
MP's are often voted in on the basis of their party, not their personal stature. So the 'selection criteria' is really one of the party more than the voting public, and often filters are vague, often with write-in candidates in many ridings where a loss might be expected.
Even more so for a less developed country.
That said, I very much appreciate this man's attitude - a 'job is a job' and we should all be so lucky to have one, and there's nothing remotely demeaning about delivering food.
The real issue is one of appropriate compensation i.e. making sure that people are paid well enough for their contributions.
One thing about this kind of work is that it's definitely material: every delivered meal is a delivered meal. White collar workers, where there's a ton of slack and lack of efficiency cannot always say that their contributions have mattered, although it's a complicated story there as well.
You are assuming a students or high schooler isn't more qualified to do the job of a "minister" of, what appeared to be, an artificial "government" that tried to syphon as much money in it's own pockets as possible.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/13/ben-sasse-ub...
One thing the article only hints at is he doesn’t speak German! Of course he couldn’t find a job in Germany.
I think this guy is going to be OK. He knows how to market himself at least.
2. The guy was honest and didn't embezzle funds to retire in luxury.
I believe he will not only be ok but thrive.