alt Hacker NewsI am not German, but I live in Germany and things can be debated in detail and from various viewpoints. Things are rarely black and white.
But I am getting kind of tired of the canned half informed opinions like "outrageous energy prices" usually although not always followed by "closing cheap nuclear will do that for you". Energy like natural gas is still elevated compared to 2021 but it's nowhere near outrageous anymore. Electricity as an end consumer I can now get cheaper than in e.g. France, and they just announced dirt cheap industry prices etc. So things can be complex, what was the case in 2023 might not be in 2025. Things change but it takes too much effort to question if what was true two years ago is still really true, so we are stuck with these lazy views.
I did not even mention energy prices in my post. But it is a basic truth that high energy prices reduce the competitiveness of industry.
>and they just announced dirt cheap industry prices
Any person who thinks that this is any more than a figleaf lacks basic economic understanding. Where does the German government get money? From German industry. The industry price is a tax break.
But you are also right, just continuously talking about the price of energy is another way to avoid talking about the structural issues. Lack of cost competitiveness does not just come from differences in the price of electricity.
The hard truth is that the Chinese are very good at manufacturing. Even for high quality products. For decades they have only gotten better and have taken over more and more industries, they did this by being cheaper and better, while also innovating. The future of the German industry depends on rising to that challenge and actually being able to stay better than the Chinese.
If you work somewhere in German industry, a phrase you are going to hear is "so haben wir das immer schon gemacht" (this is the way we have always done this) and you will find an institutional unwillingness, from the management down to the staff, to engage in radical change, to try new things and to embrace new technologies. This protects German industry from fads, which quickly fade, but it also means that it is always at risk of drastically falling behind when it comes to genuinely superior ways of working.