On almost every indicator, Germany’s south is doing better than its north

https://www.economist.com/blogs/kaffeeklatsch/2017/08/explaining-munich-miracle

87 38 9 years ago

s3nnyy3• 9 years ago

Yeah the South is better than the North for many reasons. I lived in Munich for 22 years but still Octoberfest beer prices doubled since 2002 (introduction of the Euro) (http://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/zahlen-und-fakten/soziale-sit...), while wages only rose 20% (http://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/zahlen-und-fakten/soziale-sit...). That is why I moved 350km South-West from Munich, Germany (most livable city in Germany) to Zurich, Switzerland (most livable city in the world)

hk__2• 9 years ago

Isn’t Zurich horribly expensive, like the rest of Switzerland? I went to Geneva once and the prices of things struck me compared to what we have in Paris, France (which is already a pretty expensive city).

matttproud2• 9 years ago

Consider what you're paid in Zürich. That salary buys you far more here than anywhere else — especially when you compare tax efficiency to its neighboring countries. It's clean, society functions well, and people are kind, etc. You don't find this Goldilocks Zone everywhere.

Compared to the U.S., where I am originally from, I couldn't pay any amount of money to get what I have here.

ucaetano• 9 years ago

You can work in Zurich and live in Southern Germany, where you can buy a 1-2BR apartment for <200k Euros.

Your commute time will rage from 55min to 1h15min.

ephimetheus• 9 years ago

I live in Geneva, and it's horribly expensive. The living costs as well as rents are insanely high. The wages are higher as well though. The worst thing is if you're paid in Euros and have to convert them to Swiss francs for spending

homakov2• 9 years ago

I've only been to Berlin and Cologne (sooo boring there) and I found Zurich and the rest of CH so much better. Can you say the key difference between these two countries as a German?

tormeh• 9 years ago

You found Berlin boring, but Switzerland not boring? By what criteria?

praneshp• 9 years ago

Is Zurich the most livable city for you or according to some study? I found it average (definitely not bad) but I have only been there about 10 days in my life. For example, given a choice I'd choose to live in Luzern than Zurich.

s3nnyy3• 9 years ago

If you look for a job / if you want to move to Zurich, let me know: "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in tech" https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...

aaron-lebo• 9 years ago

From today:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/6v3fma/three_germa...

also recent:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/18/16162234/r...

Today, Massachusetts’s GDP per capita is about double what you find in Mississippi — roughly equivalent to the gap between Switzerland and Slovakia — and it’s not getting any narrower.

rayiner• 9 years ago

That's a highly misleading comparison. The Switzerland-Slovakia comparison is PPP-adjusted GDP per capita. Comparisons between US states are not. Adjusted for purchasing power, the MS-MA comparison looks very different, with MA only 15% richer: https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2016/10/1.... That's closer than Switzerland versus Germany.

lampenrad• 9 years ago

It doesn't stop at the German border, though. And if you look at this map, the distinction between S and N is much less clear: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gross_domestic_pro...

Southern Germany, Western Austria, Northern Italy, Switzerland and parts of France: There's a big wealth cluster in the larger region around the Alps. Why? I don't know, but as a South German myself, I'm not too convinced by the claims of the article.

treigerm• 9 years ago

I remember learning about the Blue Banana (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana) in high school. You can see it pretty clearly on your map.

mpweiher• 9 years ago

And it used to be the other way around, with Bavaria being very poor. Decades of Länderfinanzausgleich fixed that.

Now the industries of Northrine-Westfalia have been in decline for some time, so that's been dragging everything down. And Berlin lost a lot of its aid and most of the East is also somewhat northern.

rbehrends• 9 years ago

This is really horribly misleading.

It's primarily because Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, and Hesse are the richest non-city states (in terms of per-capita GDP). But if you include city states, then Hamburg and Bremen are both richer than those, while Saxony, Thuringia, Rhineland-Palatinate and the Saarland are among the poorer German states [1]. (Comparatively speaking; obviously, they're still pretty darn well off compared to most of the world.)

Also, the West-East divide is far bigger than the North-South divide still. There's not a single state in the former East Germany with higher per-capita GDP than any of the former West German ones.

The line that the article draws is overall pretty arbitrary and mixes up rich and poor states on both sides of the divide. The EU has regional breakdowns at the NUTS-2 [2] and NUTS-3 level that provide a more nuanced picture.

[1] http://imactivate.com/regionexplorer/indexedeu/?options=true...

[2] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...

allendoerfer• 9 years ago

This. The North has a few big cities but states like Brandenburg, Lower Saxony or even Northern Hesse are basically empty, compared to the South. Of course rural areas have a lower GDP.

leipert• 9 years ago

I agree.

I think it is fair to say that Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg have more economical power than other states, and one would be churlish not to recognize that. But those other metrics he cites are chosen arbitrarily:

- School Rankings. If you look for different criteria, e.g. the teacher-pupil ratio in elementary schools, it looks totally different. [1] And if you look at universities, different again [2]. If you look at the school quality (defined by ability to read and STEM subjects) the, east and north looks really good. [3]

- Life expectancy: Come on... Men: Between the 4th and 11th place is just 1 year. Women: Between the 4th and 15th place is one year. [4]

Furthermore I think the combination of this states is chosen rather poorly. Ask anyone in Leipzig or Kassel if they consider themselves to be from the south of Germany. No one would does that.

[1] http://www.insm-bildungsmonitor.de/2017_best_i_schueler-lehr...

[2] http://www.insm-bildungsmonitor.de/2017_best_i_betreuungsrel...

[3] http://www.insm-bildungsmonitor.de/2017_best_i_iqb-lesen-201...

[4] http://www.lebenserwartung.info/index-Dateien/regdiff.htm

rothbardrand• 9 years ago

Any division of a country is going to be arbitrary to some extent, but east/west was due to the Berlin Wall-- an artificial border-- while north south is due to culture, a difference more of choice than edict.

jacquesm2• 9 years ago

but east/west was due to the Berlin Wall--

No, East-West was because of the border running North-South through Germany intersecting with the main motorway from Hannover to Berlin at Helmstedt.

The Berlin Wall was an interior division separating two parts of Berlin, 'West Berlin' and 'East Berlin', but to get to West Berlin by road you had to cross through a large chunk of East Germany first, and then you'd enter West-Berlin through yet another border crossing. The road from Helmstedt to West-Berlin was known as the 'corridor'.

West Berlin was best thought of as an island within East Germany with the Berlin wall circling West Berlin.

eighthnate• 9 years ago

Also, the West-East divide is far bigger than the North-South divide still. There's not a single state in the former East Germany with higher per-capita GDP than any of the former West German ones.

Interesting. It's amazing that even after 25 years of reunification, east germany still lags behind west germany. Also, isn't east germany in northern germany as well. It does seem like the author cherrypicked data just to write an article.

posterboy3• 9 years ago

Is this a historic trend or a consequence of the war?

ringaroundthetx2• 9 years ago

like between Prussia and Bavaria?

jackcosgrove• 9 years ago

I took it to mean the Second World War, and the different occupation zones.

rsp1984• 9 years ago

The characteristic divide in dialects of German is the “Uerdingen” isogloss separating low forms of the language (where the pronoun “I” is pronounced “ik”) from central and high ones (where it is pronounced “ich”).

No. Only Berlin / Brandenburg people say "Ik". Southern German dialects say "I" (pronounced as "ee" would be in English).

voltagex_• 9 years ago

Hah, all this time I thought it was an Austrian thing - my late grandmother while helping me practice my German pronounced it as "Ik" and then quickly corrected herself.

lvkleist3• 9 years ago

Having lived in Berlin and Freiburg, I can confirm this. I also find it interesting that most in southern Baden-Württemberg still refer to their dialect as "Allemanic"(as in the ancient confederation of Germanic tribes, the "Allemani" Excerpt from Wikipedia: "First mentioned by Cassius Dio in the context of the campaign of Caracalla of 213, the Alemanni captured the Agri Decumates in 260, and later expanded into present-day Alsace, and northern Switzerland, leading to the establishment of the Old High German language in those regions."). The french word for Germans, "Allemands", reflects these old tribal boundaries as well. It's easy to forget that Germany as a unified state is young, but try sometime watching someone from Berlin or Hamburg attempt to decipher a sentence spoken in the rural Allemanic dialect, it's pretty futile.(Note: this doesn't really apply to larger towns like Freiburg anymore. You have to drive half an hour or so into the countryside, and find an older person. Young people often prefer to speak Standard German nowadays).

sarabande• 9 years ago

The article is only incorrect by omission. I am not sure, but you may confusing the term "low form," that is, Low German / Plattdeutsch, with being geographically southern. It is geographically northern -- the "low" refers to elevation, not latitude.

Precisely people in Berlin/Brandenburg say "ik" _because it is Low German, which is spoken in the North of Germany, which is what the Uerdinge isogloss describes_.

The article did fail to mention the other big lines, the Benrather and the Speyer line (which is what you are referring to with Oberdeutsch dialect differentiating between "ich" and "i").

There are a lot of these lines drawn by linguists.

1maginary• 9 years ago

I agree both you and the parent, I don't think you're disagreeing, you're just talking about different things. You're talking about the historical distinction, the parent is talking about how things are nowadays.[0]

I found the article a bit disingenuous since you need to know what the Uerdingen line is and its context to understand what they're saying, since the divide isn't quite what it used to be.

[0] http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-2/f25c/

gumby• 9 years ago

I find the more interesting distinction is between the fates of Bavaria and Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony, formed by the British by amalgamating smaller states after the war). Both are large, agrarian states, with Niedersachsen somewhat wealthier in the 1950s. However Bavaria diversified its economy better and became a powerhouse, while Niedersachsen was, IIRC, the poorest of the West German Länder at the time of unification, and until that time received the most federal assistance.

On almost every indicator, Germany’s south is doing better than its north

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