These are just some of the words that occur to me when I speak to Germans under the age of 30. It bears mentioning that these words do not just occur to me in the context of the youths themselves. I think of myself with these terms as well. In some senses, I’m awed by the sheer magnitude of these youths’…………..something. Yesterday, I had a conversation with four Germans guys under the age of 30 re the fact that most Praktikums (internships) are unpaid in Germany. One of the youths has an internship with the finance ministry. This is an unpaid 6 week program. The complaint of the young Germans is that these internships are coming to be required but they remain unpaid. Furthermore, the students’ (since most of the people doing these internships are finishing their education) costs of living are as well not covered. This means, in effect, that the students have to pay to work for these organizations (I say organizations because of the wide range of entities by which German students do these internships, from large businesses, to small, to government ministries).
My first reaction was that these positions confer a great deal of prestige on the persons selected and that, therefore, they should be willing to pay the necessary costs to complete the internship. However, they responded that this limits these positions to persons who have the financial means to do so. I felt little sympathy for this position given the amount of debt the average American university student willingly encumbers in order to achieve their diploma. Hard to feel much sympathy for the poor German students who’re staring at 1200 of debt for the experience of their internship when American students routinely rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to pay their debt off. I was reminded, however, that German students do not have access to credit in the same way that American students do. namely, they cannot simply go into a bank and secure a low-interest student loan to assist in bearing these costs. There was some argument over this question and, given its significance to our entire discussion on this issue, it merits discovery.
This discussion expanded to include the financial crisis and who should bear responsibility and exactly how they should be forced to bear that responsibility. 2 of the 4 Germans argued that wealthy persons (either in America or Germany) should be forced directly to bear the burden of the financial crisis by a tax on their wealth (not sure how we would measure the damage to the economy without accounting for the losses suffered by these very people). Putting aside the technical difficulties of instituting such a plan, it’s more interesting to contemplate the sentiment behind it.
I argued that this idea of blaming the wealthy for the financial crisis woefully misinterpreted the genesis of the crisis as well as the beneficiaries. I have been in favor of the government bailouts (yes, at the taxpayers expense as they reminded me several times) precisely because I believe that an enormous sector of the American populace benefited from the boondoggle. For every wealthy investor there were a hundred persons who re-financed their homes and bought new toys or renovated their homes or something like that. For every Wall street wiz kid who irresponsibly handled his firms/clients’ money, there were hundreds of thousands of jobs on main streets around America that were preserved (perhaps artificially) by the hubris at the heart of this system.
Ultimately, however, the German youths seemed less concerned with the bailout and the financial crisis as much as really evincing an antagonism to capitalism itself. One of them suggested that employers should rotate persons through various job positions from secretary to CEO. That guy then said that he did not believe that CEOs were at all necessary and that computers could perform their jobs as well or better than the humans currently acting in that capacity. I’ll have to speak to more German youths to get a sense how wide spread this sentiment is, but, suffice it to say, it was a highly entertaining Sunday brunch conversation.
No comments:
Post a Comment