The German problem? It's an analogue country in a digital world

This article appears to simply be UK propaganda to convince UK citizens not to copy German regulation. The argument seems to be that they are addicted to older industry and thus their economic growth (dubiously but traditionally measured via GDP growth) is slowest among the G7. They list other countries like France and Italy that arguably are similarly attached to older industy but the article doesn't analyse this apparent contradiction since presumably it doesn't further their agenda.

Meanwhile I (an EU resident not residing in Germany) am using a German digital bank, a German digital broker, but a Swiss replacements for a lot of google services. I am a bit reluctant to do business with UK digital services and definitely see it as a negative when I am shopping around among alternatives because EU regulation has been a boon for me personally when dealing with companies behaving poorly. While EU regulation surely prevails when UK businesses sell to me, I'd just rather skip them.

> The US and the UK have 5.22 AI startups for each 100,000 inhabitants; Germany has 1.9

It’s cute when journalists try to do things with numbers. This is a very weird sentence. Firstly, what is number of AI startups per capita a metric of? Some AI startups are more important than others.

Secondly why are US and UK lumped together? I assume they don’t each have precisely 5.22 AI startups per 100k inhabitants, so is this the combined total of their populations? Why combine those two countries? Why not combine US and Canada, or UK and France, or US and Japan?

What a stupid article. Their benchmark for digital relevance? The number of AI startups... Sure, Germany has had less recent growth than any other G7 member - but it is also among the highest GDP per capita of the G7, highest GDP in Europe, and 3rd highest in the world.

I live in Germany since a few years not and I find so sad to see that they do not have any interconnected services and that there is so much red tape for everything.

The different health suppliers are not interconnected so they cannot send even the most basic things digitally, everything is posted to you and you take it to the other supplier.

It is not uncommon to receive CDs for x-rays or similar to take to another specialist. Makes you cringe.

And do not get me started on internet connections!

> the new growth sectors – smartphones, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence (AI). An analogue world is rapidly going digital, and Germany has been painfully slow to realize that

There is an important silver lining in being "slow". You learn from the mistakes of the "fast" ones.

You don't need to look too deeply in the "move fast and break things" tech sector to see not just mistakes but major disasters: destroying people's privacy and agency, historically unprecedented power concentration, rampant regulatory arbitrage, demolition of important sectors such as journalism etc.

The real issue is that Germany (as key actor within the EU) has been for some time paying lip service to an alternative, less dystopic "digital world", but not delivering.

Cars are the key industry in Germany and similar to the US albeit in a less extreme manner moving towards premium combustion cars has Germany caught in a local optimum which is now shrinking due to external change.

Investing in AI is not going to fix that manufacturing restructuring problem in Germany. Nor will asking an AI to write superficial feel good articles for British readers where manufacturing problems are endemic, the Brexit transition and solving the over dependence on Londons financial ‚industry‘ is far from a solved issue.

Seems like Germany is having this problem for the past 20 years... but here we are. Maybe accept the fact that they are a manufacturing powerhouse and will remain so in the foreseeable future?

The problems with the logic I see are:

1. Several years of lower growth, after years of higher growth, can have many causes. Many might be temporary, or reflect nontrivial time dynamics between growth factors & their results.

2. The digital transition was long in place before 2018. So that linkage looks very weak.

3. AI GDP growth due to AI is just getting going anywhere. So no link at all to those last several years.

4. Startup numbers don’t always reflect industry adoption numbers. Growth comes from many places.

I do think AI is going to eat up a lot of the economy. It is ultimately a foundational tech, like electricity & computation. And with high specialization potential, like software.

And AI tech has been improving quickly for many years now.

But even with explosive growth that will take time.

I expect a lot of bright people in Germany are aware of that likelihood.

I take a very positive view of the fact that German society is not yet fully digitalized and that some developments are viewed rather critically and are only adopted in part. Ultimately, I see adaptability as a particular strength of Germany. There is always a willingness to learn from mistakes and improve. In a pluralistic society, this sometimes takes time, but I am sure that Germany is still on the right track. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Germany was often referred to as “the sick man of Europe”. That may now be the case again in the eyes of some people, but this will only be a transitional phase.

> It saw no reason to change the model and invested too little in physical, human and digital infrastructure.

> The US is the prime example of a country that has moved with the times and has been able to adapt its industrial structure to changing circumstances.

What model? What change? What "physical, human and digital" infrastructure investments? What adaptations?

This article is shit. An average 7th grader can write better.

As for the premise of the title alone: Good. Such a thing would be a welcome respite (if imperfect given the practical pervasiveness of digitization) from an ever more grossly digitized world of bullshit "optimization" that heavily serves as a cover for grotesque normalization of surveillance, social control, soft authoritarianism and centralized tracking across the board.

That such a title comes from a UK paper, from a country with a fundamentally sick level of social monitoring and essentially Orwellian levels of needing to spy on everything possible before selectively deeming it offensive, is amusing.

As for the article's content: It's half-baked screed about Germany being economically doomed by a contrived mishmash of fragmentary arguments that the author poorly defines or seems to understand. His strange blurbs about the dangers of the far right in Germany (this having to do what with digitization?) are just nonsensical. If anything, Germany is in political practice considerably more progressive than the UK has been for years, and in any case it's a long way from facing a resurgence of anything seriously resembling Nazism.

The Guardian sometimes posts interesting news, but more often than not, especially for opinion pieces, one wonders if its writers are capable of pulling their heads out of their asses long enough to string one coherent idea with another one.

> Since 2018, Germany has been the slowest-growing economy in the G7 – expanding by 0.4% a year on average. While the rest of the eurozone’s big four – France, Italy and Spain – have been showing signs of recovering from the slowdown caused by the Ukraine war-induced energy shock

Hm https://xkcd.com/1102/

Out of all industrial nations intent to put Germany (rightfully) to shame I'd say Great Britain is one of the worst examples. Specifically UK's economic model of centralization towards London and its financial hub has been rather destructive to the rest of the nation.

PS: And if the idiotic propping up of AI as the focus-point of whether a society fares well or not continues, then I'll guess we'll at some point see what we've seen with other "crucial sectors" across europe before: Nations backing/establishing local market "champions". Think AI city works (bad in quality but rich in government contracts).