Reply #4: Based on my experience living in Germany and also studying some

[JDPriestly]

of their law, I believe that Germany's economic success is due to a tradition dating back to the Middle Ages of apprenticeships in trades, respect for the work of tradesmen, cleanliness and organization in the workplace (probably due to the training of teenaged apprentices in good work habits), and Germany's legal protections for working people that require large companies to place ordinary employees on their board of directors, universal health care (top quality), an unemployment insurance system that provides incentives to employers to retain workers and many other similar programs.

We should try to learn from Germany.

I would like to mention that Germany has no oil and really not that many other natural resources. Further, many of its cities were bombed nearly to the ground in WWII.

A memory that is etched in my mind:

We spent a couple of years in small towns north of Munich, Germany. My oldest child was born while we lived there, and since I did not speak German very well, I could not get a job.

Every day, I took my baby for a walk in a baby carriage. We often passed a house where an elderly man was building a wall with cement blocks. He started with just a couple of blocks stacked on top of each other. Each day as I passed the wall, he steadily, methodically, slowly placed one block on the other, carefully, precisely, patiently. That is the spirit of the Germans -- steady, methodical, slow, careful, precise to the point of painstaking and, above all, patient. They are generous but in a cautious, quiet, methodical way. Their food is simple and very filling.

I had the impression that the French valued beauty, taste and a sense of luxury -- well made clothing, architecture, good food and wine -- more than anything. In contrast, my impression of the Germans was that they valued reliability, strength, quality, care -- sturdy furniture, high quality wool sweaters and jackets, strong, thick walls and filling food and beer. I'm overgeneralizing, but those are my impressions.

So, to my mind the explanation for Germany's success is in its culture of trade organizations and training that dates back long before the modern age, to its pro-labor laws which have prevented the development of a culture of us versus them within the workplace by assuring workers of fair treatment and employers about certainty regarding their obligations and to the patient, methodical, hard-working habits of the German people.