I was astounded in 2020 when I read an article in the New York Times about the economic catastrophe in Venezuela and there was not a single mention of socialism.
And I was even more astounded in 2024 when the NYT published another article about Venezuela’s economic misery and once again didn’t mention socialism.
Today’s column will be about another amazing example of blindness in the same newspaper.
I’ll start with this chart I shared last year, but it’s been modified to highlight how energy prices (on the vertical axis) in Germany are much higher than they are in many other nations.
In particular, German electricity prices are twice as high as they are in the United States and three times higher than they are in China.
Given the importance of manufacturing to the German economy, this is a very important piece of information.
Yet in a column for today’s New York Times, Konstantin Richter wrote more than 1200 words about Germany’s economic decline and never once mentioned energy or the “green new deal” policies that have pushed up the price of economic activity.
I’m not joking.
It’s a tough time for Germany. …The German economy, once known for its efficiency, orderliness and stability, is in a terrible mess. It’s not just that the numbers are dire, though the country has basically been in a recession for three years. …No, the worst of it is that our dynamic economy gave postwar Germany a sense of identity. For all our flaws, we had a country that functioned better than others. Now it doesn’t anymore… On the face of it, Germany thrived in the first two decades of the new century, weathering the financial crisis better than others and hanging on to its industrial core. But in hindsight, the country was on borrowed time. …The country’s welfare state has become too expensive, and Germans will need to work longer hours and more years to sustain it. …To adapt, the economy — still the world’s third-largest — needs smart investment, public support and a healthy dose of self-belief. That won’t end the country’s problems, but it could put us back on the path to prosperity.
For what it’s worth, the article makes some reasonable points.
But to write about German stagnation without mentioned the folly of green energy policies is sort of like writing about American history in the 1860s and not mentioning the Civil War.
Joseph Sternberg of the Wall Street Journal, by contrast, editorialized about the German economy last year and hit the nail on the head. Here are some excerpts from his column.
Europe’s largest economy…is in the middle of an economic omni-crisis, and the most acute pain for households and businesses alike concerns energy. …German households and businesses pay among the highest energy prices in the world. The average German household paid 39.5 euro cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity in 2024, compared with 32.1 in Britain, 27.8 in France and 14.9 in the U.S. Midsize industrial users pay 24.8 euro cents per kilowatt hour, better than Britain’s 46.4 but much worse than France’s 16.7 or America’s 7.4. …Blame a green-energy transition that’s been under way for some 20 years. Germany has steadily removed affordable mainstays such as coal from its power mix, while also phasing out dependable nuclear power. …The energy transition was launched by former CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel, and she started the country’s exit from nuclear power in 2011.
