It definitely comes and goes in waves, I think. The interplay between infrastructure and economy is key. Your economy is dependent on things like ports, rails, pipelines, cables, roads, powerstations, etc. A country can’t continually overhaul those things, and once they’ve invested in them, they are stuck for a while. This leads to weird situations where one country that’s been behind for a little while can pass another country.

The US electrified first, and when Europe electrified, it used higher voltage, which allowed for more efficient home electrification, while many Americans are stuck with slow kettles, and clothes dryers, water heaters, furnaces, and stoves that run on fossil fuels. Similarly, widespread internet rolled out in the US first, but countries that came later were able to get higher speeds.

The economy of most countries, especially the US and China, is a house of cards. While there may be more investment, there’s also more risk, and more inequality. Germany may be more stagnant, but it also may be more stable. It doesn’t matter if the GDP per capita is higher in the US than Germany if the average person has no healthcare, paid for schooling, or social safety net.

One of the biggest lies (maybe more of a “spin” than a lie) that has been told over the past century is that the “economy” is the stock market, gdp, net import/exports, commodities, etc. Those are all important, and economists like to use them cause they are easier than getting to what really matters to most people.

I found this Economics Explained video on the German economy pretty interesting. They suggest that Germany is losing its edge when it comes to advanced manufacturing but that isn’t really as bad as it sounds. America and China are massive economies and neither specializes in advanced manufacturing but in international trade. They suggest that Germany is simply moving into becoming another country that specializes mostly in international trading instead of producing things domestically.

Countries go through rises and falls. From an American perspective, I still think of Germany as one of the best European economies. German products are still considered top quality and Germany itself seems a place people would like to be for a number of reasons. Maybe you are too familiar with Germany’s current issues to see it fairly compared to other countries.

You probably know more European history than I do, but look at England’s global dominance a century ago compared to now, or further back at countries like Belgium or the Netherlands. It’s all a dice game at any time which country is in the right position at the right time.

The US is still riding the wave of economic benefit of being the major player that didn’t have its infrastructure ravaged by 2 world wars. We were able to sell everything to everyone after that, and it left us in a great position to be able to take advantage of the computer age.

It will probably be an energy (nuclear/fusion/battery) or space technology breakthrough that will bring the next huge economic breakthrough for whomever comes up with the answer to those problems. I don’t see anything putting Germany in a bad position for that kind of thing. The catch that I’ll say exists now that didn’t before is our ability to travel and communicate so much more efficiently than ever is there are far fewer sole American, sole German, etc companies that the money from a boom will probably be spread around more than in the past, so economic waves may be smaller, yet more frequent than huge booms and busts in the past.

As far as China goes, the impression I’m able to form is they are able to do what they do by doing what many countries would consider to be cooking their books. They seem to have much greater control over their economy and businesses themselves and their currency to push their agenda, to good and not so good ends. I don’t invest in China due to what I see as a lack of real transparency.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to luck though. Things like climate change, immigration, and wars are always going to interfere with the plans of the greatest leaders, accidental discoveries will be made, and multitudes of other factors will pick our future winners and losers. It’s much easier to look back and say, it’s obvious we should have done X back then than it is to look forward and correctly say we need to do Y now.

Germany will survive, as it will have to change with the times sooner or later. You’ll form trade and political alliances with different players as your economy changes. Young people will learn different careers as we did to join the age of technology and how our grandparents handled mechanized agriculture, airplanes, and automobiles. This area in time will likely be a blip in history, it’s just more important feeling because it’s our here and now. I don’t think you’d feel Germany is not at least in the top half of European nations, so that still puts you ahead of the majority. We’re all struggling now, but we’ll still wake up tomorrow and figure things out.

I hope that gives you a more comfortable take on things from an outsider with a passing interest in world economics.

According to Varoufakis, Europe missed the bus on cloud capital (=big cloud platforms like amazon, meta, twitter,…) and the race is currently playing out between US and China.

Your reading of the situation is correct. There is a few reasons why this is the case:

1. De-industrialization

Imperialism allows western countries’ capitalists to exploit the cheaper resources and labor of some economically less developed nations and acquire super-profits on top through unequal exchange, since doing this is much more profitable than producing industrial goods in the west directly, western industrial capitalists have a huge incentive to move their factories to the third world. This has the effect of de-industrializing the west itself, and has gotten so bad that some European countries like the UK can barely even produce their own steel anymore, which is very bad given how important steel is to a lot of industries.

This makes the west more and more dependent on supply lines they don’t necessarily control in order to get the resources and goods they need, in this situation the smart thing to do would be to diversify your supplier countries do reduce any ones’ leverage over your country. But…

2. De-localization and American influence

The US has been hard at work making sure Europe was dependent on them above anyone else for supplies.

They have also have been offering generous advantages to businesses who would de-localize to the US, aggravating the problem for their own profits.

This is part of the reasons why the US has been doing somewhat better than the rest of the west despite de-industrialization and financialization affecting them too, they’ve been sucking on Europe like a parasite to offset the problem ever so slightly.

3. Innovation vs profits

As you’ve noted, most of the technological progress lately has been happening in the third world who has been catching up while the west seems to have lost it’s drive and is being overtaken. There are a lot of factors at play here but the main issue is the profit motive. A lot of research and a lot of things that are useful for a society aren’t profitable.

Take China’s high speed train network for example, it’s a very good thing for the peoples that there is such a good method of public transportation available, but it’s not profitable, the Chinese state is running it at a loss (offset by other income sources, but still). Because of that, such a good railway network would never be built in the west because the western companies and even governments are only interested in infrastructures if they bring in a profit.

An other example is renewable energy. For many years a lot of peoples have had and propagated this narrative that, since green tech is becoming cheaper, profit driven organizations would have an incentive to switch away from fossil energy, yet this hasn’t happened. Why? Because profit isn’t that simple.

Why can a business buy a pile of woof for 1$ and sell a chair made from the wood for 2$? Where do the added 1$ come from? It comes from work, they can take this chair made from 1$ worth of wood for 2$ because it’s not just a pile of wood anymore, something happened to it, someone used their time and energy to turn the wood into a chair. If it was possible to use some kind of spell to turn wood into chairs without effort, competition would drive the price down to the value of the dead materials that makes it: 1$, and the profit rate in the industry would be 0$ or very close to 0.

This, in a nutshell, is why cheaper green tech hasn’t pushed corporation to transition to clean energy. Sure, it’s cheaper, but it’s also vastly less profitable because green tech like solar panels and wind turbines are much more automatized than fossil fuel which mean less peoples who’s work add value to each unit of energy produced which mean proportionally less profit. This is why the green transition hasn’t happened and won’t anytime soon as long as the west is driven by the profit motive above all else.

4. What can be done?

The problem is the profit motive and private property. The capitalists shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever they want with the industries and infrastructures society needs, taking them to a different country whenever they feel like it, taking jobs away from us to exploit less developed nations, etc…

What needs to be done is to kick out the neoliberals, nationalize a bunch of important industries, restrict what capitalists are allowed to do with their private properties and moving toward abolishing private property altogether.

And the way to move toward this goal is to learn political theory and start organizing. Go to marginalized communities, poor peoples, even to the petty bourgeois not wealthy enough to move their business to the US and get left to die by the wealthier international bourgeoisie who are robbing their country, help them, listen to their problems and their complaints, help them understand where these problems come from and why the right’s analysis of the situation isn’t correct, and build a democratic popular movement able and willing to take power, by force if necessary.