On Fri, 27 Dec 2002 10:36:38 -0800, James A. Donald
<jamesd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> --
>When the two Germanies were united everyone thought that all
>that was need was to install the West German system in East
>Germany, and poof, East Germany would become as productive as
>West Germany.
>
>It did not happen.
>
>So then people thought, install the West German system, add
>west german levels of capital, and then East Germany would
>become as productive as West Germany.
>
>It did not happen either.
>
>So what is wrong with East Germans and East Germany?
>
>One obvious possibility is that we may be seeing Galt flight.
>Perhaps the best people fled the communists, leaving behind a
>sullen inert mass of people waiting for commands that will
>never come.
>
> --digsig
> James A. Donald
> 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
> ViSwktOS4jbXLJeQI6vHVX1sy771ZAvYZcNsDkan
> 49zpGS8ZyKjaNepDzdUahjbI2jyZVnx0uaAhgTzKf
>
>
Hi James -
First of all, you do have Galt flight. The best and the brightest did
indeed leave for greener pastures, and are continuing to do so. (There
are some really great real estate op****tunities in eastern Germany,
with some excellent and really neat buildings up for sale for a
pittance there: but no one wants to live there, since there are no
high-paying jobs and no money to pay high rents with. But it is the
tip for retirees who have a chunk of cash and have always wanted to
live in a restored 15th century house...)
But there is more to it than this. The demographics of eastern
Germany are catastrophal: with young, productive folks leaving, the
population average has grown significantly older than that of eastern
Germany, and effectively the only places where there is growth is
where the West has moved in, such as Berlin.
I could start in on this, but I don't want to bore beyond belief more
than I usually do - on the other hand, my mother-in-law is visiting
for the holidays, and the weather here is pissing, so I've got some
time - so let's review the situation.
First, Eastern Germany's birth rates had been declining even before
the building of the wall. Anyone who had any sense of ambition and was
unwilling to be part of Soviet repression left Eastern Germany by any
means possible, often walking literally hundreds of miles and hiding
from border guards in order to do so. The reason that the wall was
built was to stop this massive drain: according to the estimates back
then, the Soviet Occupation Zone, aka later the German Democratic
Republic, would have not had enough people left to function by 1964
(or put better: those that were left would have been the members of
the party, without a population left upon which to experiment).
So the wall was built. The best and the brightest continued to escape,
either by risking their lives - and many died trying to escape - or
were fortunate to be bought out by wealthy western relatives (going
rate was around $100,000 for a family with two kids, about $20,000 for
a retiree, but more for highly-qualified people...). The government of
the GDR divvied the country up into zones, movement between which was
difficult at best, and access to the border zones was strictly and
rigidly controlled, so people resigned themselves to living and
working whereever they were. And the key word is resignation.
Now, add to this the already poor demographics of eastern Germany.
Eastern Germany, unlike the west, was not heavily industrialized, but
rather largely agricultural and lacked many natural resources: one of
the only natural resources was Uranium, mined near Freiberg, which
actually went into the first generation of Soviet nuclear weapons, but
that is another story.
So, the government, stalinist at best, decided to industrialize
heavily and created, basically from scratch, a chemical industry, a
heavy machinery industry, steel industry, etc. Jobs were plentiful, if
poorly paid, but since prices were very, very low, things, for the
aveage worker, were okay. Lots of day care was available as well, and
indeed there were few mothers who didn't work.
But that was also the problem: there were few mothers who could
afford, both literally and figuratively, not to work and stay home to
take care of the kids. This was, after all, considered to be bourgeois
and decadent, since it was not a productive use of human capital for
the betterment of the party and thus socialism. The deconstruction of
the family followed, with a further drop in the birth rate. Now, given
that bourgeois ethics were not only passe, but more im****tantly
traiterous to the development of socialism, ***ual mores were not only
relaxed, but promiscuity was even encouraged: my colleagues who grew
up in the 1960s and 1970s in eastern Germany had, apparently had a
grand old time, even more so than my colleagues growing up during the
same time in western Germany, let alone the US. This led, as might be
expected, to a significant increase in single-parent households, but
since daycare was readily available, and indeed socially not only
acceptable, but even heavily encouraged, many eastern Germans grew up
in day care, cared for by the State.
Nonetheless, the family survived, since the nuclear family has its
advantages. But an entire generation grew up, basically, without
families and when they came of breeding age, failed to marry and
failed to have children within a family situation. So after a short
increase in the 1950s and 1960s, birth rates started to decline once
more in the 1970s. This, of course, was of major concern to the
government, since the structure of the east German population was
already poor, with many more older women than men, leading to serious
employment problems (in the sense that there was always more work than
there were qualified people!).
In the 1970s, the task of rebuilding eastern Germany was largely over
and the misallocation of resources was pretty much apparent. East
Germany ex****ted massive amounts of machinery and chemicals to the
rest of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and got little in return
for consumption. Quality of life started to drop in the 1970s and
accelerated in the 1980s, and while no one went hungry, life in
eastern Germany was, at best, drab and tedious, and at worst one spent
days at make-do work while waiting for someone to take responsibility
for fixing something so that the real work could be done. Dropping
living standards are not conducive to increased birth rates when there
is little or no chance of improvement through your children: given
that living quarters were an endemnic problem in eastern Germany,
having a kid meant that unless you had already received larger
quarters, your standard of living went down even faster. There were
ways around this, but it meant becoming active in the party, abhorrent
to most.
So, a sense of doldrums and increasing despair slunk into the system,
since there was the general realisation that things weren't going to
get better, but rather worse. If you worked in industry, you knew that
the machinery was not being maintained properly and that new machinery
was not probably in the works, and regardless of how hard you worked
and what you ex****ted, your shoes wouldn't last the winter and didn't
fit right to begin with, and that you had to save almost three year's
salary to get a car with which you couldn't go anywhere anyway (and
had to wait 5 or more years to get it...). So people basically gave up
trying to improve their lot and accepted what the government provided
them.
Except, of course, those who weren't satisfied and were willing to
risk their lives to get over the border. The numbers, after declining
in the 1970s, began to pick up in the 1980s, including increasingly
spectacular escapes, such as the family who built their own hot-air
balloon and fled to the West. The key to the collapse was the
desperate attempt to flee to West German embassies in Hungary, which
was a popular vacation spot for Germans. The moment that the East
German government allowed these people to leave Hungary, hope bloomed
that escape and flight was possible, and the fact that the train
carrying these people went from Hungary to the GDR and then on to the
FRG meant that many could actually see the train go through the towns
along the way and realize it wasn't propaganda, but rather reality.
That was the beginning of the end.
Woops, I got off the track here. Suffice to say: the Germans living in
eastern Germany were passive and many remain so; the eastern German
economy was in ruins, basically, unsustainable and falling apart;
anyone with ambition and a desire to get ahead left; immigation to
eastern Germany is negative; and those left are significantly older
and inflexible as well.
I have a friend in Bautzen, where the east Germans had their biggest
political prison (and where excellent mustard is made), who is the
chief of police there. He is from Freiburg, where he was an average
cop, and accepted a very, very attractive package to move to Bautzen
and become chief of police: he had the right party member****p (SPD),
he was squeaky clean, even having turned in colleagues for low-level
corruption, and had a family with two kids. He moved there in 1992,
taking over 1200 police for a town of 120,000 nominal population. By
1995, when we visited them, the town was down to around 80,000 and he
still had 1200 police, since he couldn't fire any except for
deliberate cause. Of the 1200, about 1/3 were alcoholics who were
completely useless for anything, even paperwork; about 10% were
completely and totally corrupt, actively aiding Polish auto theft
rings, and the rest were merely disillusioned. By 1998, the population
was down to 65,000 and he had successfully retired the alcoholics,
nailed the corrupt and reduced his force to around 450 functioning
policemen.
But in 2001, when the city turned 1000 years old, the population was
down to below 60,000. The biggest business in town is the mustard
plant, and the median age of the population is close to 60. The second
largest business in town are the old-age homes set up by the GDR
government and since privatized, yet heavily subsidized. And my friend
lives now on the outskirts of Bautzen in a village called Kleinwelka,
where the median age is 67 and the village population is down to 450
from its original 2600 is 1991. The only reason that the population is
so high is that there is a large old-age home in Kleinwelka, with some
300 people vegetating their existences out there. My friends' kids
are older and they have left to go to western Germany, since the only
jobs in town are cleaning up after old people. The company running the
home im****ts workers from Poland and the Czech republic for this, but
has increasingly been forced to use Vietnamese left over from GDR
times, since they were the only ones willing to work for the poor
wages involved.
It was a fantasy that the East Germans would have been as productive
as the West Germans, one that the German taxpayers are paying for
dearly. It would have been better and cheaper simply to shut down the
country and declare it a national park dedicated to the memory of
those who died trying to get away...
But enough; I've got to go fix one of my daughter's computers. Anyone
know why I can't get a Matrox G400 SH card to accept initialization
past normal VGA resolutions? :-p
John
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