On missing people at a kiosk, refrigerators sold off for savings, and the bad habit of mistaking austerity for a future

Sometimes, sitting at a kiosk somewhere, you can have an entire lesson in economics explained to you without a single number being mentioned.

I experienced that once on a day trip with a good friend in eastern Germany. At some point, we stopped to get something to eat. Nothing remarkable about that.

Until you notice who is missing.

Women.

Not entirely, of course. But among the younger adults, the imbalance was so striking that it was almost eerie. There were men who would quite happily have liked to meet a partner, perhaps start a family. But there were hardly any women their age around. The few who were there were usually already in relationships.

“Outmigration of young women” is what that looks like in a statistic.

At the kiosk, it looks different.

There, it means: Here is a man who would like to meet someone.

And there is no one to meet.

This is only an observation. A day trip is not a sociological study, and a few towns cannot tell us what eastern Germany as a whole is like.

But behind that observation lies a familiar problem in many rural areas: young people leave. They move to larger cities or other regions for education, university and work. Some come back.

Many do not.

What remains are ageing communities, labour shortages and, eventually, that peculiar spiral in which population decline creates further population decline.

Because when people disappear, demand disappears with them.

First, the bus runs less often. Then a shop closes. The swimming pool becomes too expensive. There is no money for culture. Schools are merged. The local doctor cannot find anyone to take over the practice. A company thinks twice about setting up business there.

Good transport links are important. You just have to make sure they don’t become the most attractive leisure activity the town has to offer.

And the next young person looks around and asks:

Why should I stay?

And so the next round begins.

It becomes particularly remarkable when the political forces doing especially well in precisely these regions are those that have made isolation and resistance to immigration central themes of their politics.

Because what do these regions need?

People.

They need young people. Families. Skilled workers. Entrepreneurs. Doctors. Care workers. Tradespeople. People who run businesses, pay taxes, live in houses, have children and keep local clubs and associations alive.

They need people to move in.

Of course we can and must discuss how migration should be managed. How many people local authorities can accommodate, how integration should work, where housing is supposed to come from and how schools need to be equipped. Sensible immigration policy does not consist of pretending that practical problems do not exist.

But turning a place that is running out of people into a fortress against newcomers is a remarkably strange form of therapy.

“When you are short of water, filling in the well does at least solve one problem reliably: afterwards, you no longer have to worry about how to get the water out.”

Besides, we can already see how dependent this country has become on people who have immigrated here.

Walk through a hospital or a care home and imagine that every employee with roots abroad simply stayed home the following morning.

It would probably be wise not to have an appointment that day.

And health care and nursing are merely the most visible examples.

Anyone who wants people to stay, or wants to attract new people, has to offer them something. Which inevitably brings us to a word that has been lending an air of gravitas to political talk shows for decades:

Competitiveness.

We have to remain internationally competitive.

And the conclusion drawn from that has been remarkably consistent: costs must come down.

Wages must not rise too much. Social benefits are too expensive. The state must save. Local authorities must save. Everything must become more efficient.

And I have always wondered:

Why does this competition seem to run almost exclusively downhill?

Why don’t we compete over who has the best schools?

The best railway?

The most effective public administration?

The best research?

The most attractive towns and cities?

The most satisfied and best-trained workforce?

Of course China has caught up. Good for the people who live there. Other countries are developing too. We live in a global market, and naturally that affects us.

But Germany is unlikely to win a competition over who can offer the cheapest labour in the long run.

And I don’t know why we would want to win it.

Somewhere on this planet, there will always be someone willing to work for less. If our plan for preserving prosperity is to reduce it until we can compete on price again, victory may eventually be within reach.

We should merely ask ourselves beforehand what, exactly, we will have won.

Germany does not possess unlimited natural resources. What once made “Made in Germany” successful around the world depended largely on something else: knowledge, education, technical expertise, research, quality and functioning infrastructure.

If those are our most important resources, choosing those very things as the place to cut spending is a remarkable strategy.

Or, to put it another way:

“We sell the fishing rod and then wonder why fish has become so expensive.”

There is another sentence I have been hearing for decades:

We must not leave our children with debt.

At first, that sounds perfectly sensible.

Except there are debts that never appear in the national debt statistics.

If I leave a school unrepaired for twenty years, I may not have taken out a loan.

I have still left someone a bill.

If I fail to maintain a bridge until it eventually has to be replaced, I may have saved money for ten years.

The next generation gets to pay for the new bridge.

If I allow railway lines, swimming pools, libraries, theatres, youth centres and municipal infrastructure to deteriorate, I may reduce the immediate need for funding.

But I have not left behind a debt-free country.

I have left behind a broken one.

Education is worse still. A bridge can be rebuilt later.

A child cannot go back and repeat their school years at the age of 35 because the money has finally become available.

Failing to invest creates debt too.

It simply appears on a different balance sheet.

And this is where it is worth taking a look inside the refrigerator at home.

Keeping it stocked can, of course, be regarded as a cost.

Food costs money.

So we stop buying food.

Savings achieved.

Now, unfortunately, we have an empty refrigerator sitting there consuming electricity for no good reason. Hardly sound economics. So we unplug it.

More savings.

And while we’re at it: we don’t actually need an empty, unplugged refrigerator at all. Let’s sell it.

Suddenly, we have not only cut our running costs considerably, we have even generated some revenue.

The budget consolidation has been a complete success.

We just don’t have anything to eat.

And tomorrow we will have neither food nor a refrigerator nor even a refrigerator left to sell.

“But last quarter’s balance sheet looks excellent.”

As a solution, this leaves something to be desired.

Of course we cannot spend unlimited amounts of money. A state has to do its sums, set priorities and be capable of deciding that something simply cannot be afforded.

But saving money is not a virtue in itself.

If I stop painting my house, I save money.

If I stop repairing the roof, I save even more.

If I then rip out the heating system and sell it, I have actually generated revenue.

My household accounts look fantastic in the short term.

I probably shouldn’t be nominated Property Manager of the Year.

And that is precisely the problem with a concept of intergenerational fairness that focuses almost entirely on the level of public debt.

Our children will not inherit only our liabilities.

They will inherit the country.

Its schools. Its roads. Its railways. Its hospitals. Its universities. Its public administration. Its economy. Its natural environment. Its culture.

And its society.

What good is a slightly smaller number next to the words “national debt” if, at the same time, the range of choices available to the next generation has become smaller and smaller?

Germany needs immigration. Some regions need it even more urgently.

But here too, we are competing.

A well-qualified person from Spain, India, Syria or anywhere else is under no obligation to choose Germany. And even if they do choose Germany, they are under no obligation to settle in a district that its own young people are leaving.

So we have to offer them something.

Functioning infrastructure would be a start.

Good schools, if they have children.

A railway that runs.

A public administration people can actually deal with.

Leisure, culture and opportunities to meet other people.

Jobs, obviously.

And a social climate in which they do not have to spend every other day debating whether people like them belong here at all.

“We desperately need you, but actually we’d rather you weren’t here” is not the strongest slogan for an international skilled-worker recruitment campaign.

And of course this does not apply only to people coming from abroad.

A 25-year-old woman from Hesse can also ask herself whether she wants to move to a shrinking rural area. And a 22-year-old man who grew up there can ask himself whether he wants to stay.

Perhaps he leaves.

And eventually those who remain sit at the kiosk wondering where everybody went.

Which brings us full circle.

Normally, this is where the grand solution is supposed to appear.

I don’t have one.

I don’t know how to revive regions that have been losing people for decades within the space of a few years.

I don’t know how to restore lost trust in politics or persuade people that someone moving here from another country does not automatically take something away from them.

I don’t know how we are supposed to renovate schools, repair the railways, build housing, restore local government capacity, secure health and social care, strengthen the economy, keep debt under control and finance an ageing society all at the same time.

“And I distrust anyone who claims to have a simple solution to all of that.”

Sensible politics begins by admitting that there is no simple solution.

Instead, there are many large and small tasks, all connected to one another.

Education policy is economic policy.

A swimming pool can be part of economic development.

Immigration policy is also demographic policy.

Culture can determine whether someone wants to live somewhere.

A bus route can determine whether a village remains a viable place for a family to live.

And a renovated school is not merely an expense in next year’s budget.

It is infrastructure for decades to come.

So we need to learn again not merely to ask:

“What will this cost us today?”

But also:

“What will it cost us tomorrow if we don’t do it today?”

Because, of course, we can carry on saving.

We can leave the refrigerator empty.

We can unplug it.

And if the figures still aren’t pretty enough, we can sell it.

At some point, however, we ought to remember why we had a refrigerator in the first place.

I don’t know whether that will be enough.

I don’t even know whether we will start in time.

But the fact that a problem has become damned difficult does not mean that we should stop trying to solve it.

Or, to put it rather less solemnly and rather more Hessian:

“Uffgebbe kann ja jede!”

Giving up is something anyone can do.

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