Ostalgie

I have mentioned on here before that some unknown person signed me up to receive five emails each day from the lefties at portside.org. Sometimes they are quite interesting and other times they are completely off the rails. As an example, consider this sympathetic defense of everyone's favorite regime, the German Democratic Republic.

Oh my.

Cedar Rapids is more realistic than I thought

On randy insurance salesmen or, more precisely, re-insurance men, in Germany.

Somewhere in here is a paper on when workers prefer compensation in kind to compensation in cash.

Hat tip: anonymous UM gradual student

Not only Libyans hire out their dissertations

The NYT has some well-deserved fun with the plagiarizing, and now disgraced, German defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.

A tasty snippet:

Ms. Merkel [the German prime minister], a former academic married to a professor, was being accused of belittling intellectual property theft and, by implication, the value of an advanced degree, which is not a purely academic matter in this country. Many jobs require such degrees in Germany, where, as is not the case in America, calling oneself doctor for having completed a thesis in, say, political science or art history, is not embarrassing but normal, even when filling out Lufthansa’s online booking forms. (The airline generously provides three levels of academic achievement for its overachieving countrymen: doctor, professor and professor doctor, skipping the extremely rare but not unheard-of German mouthful Herr Professor Doctor Doctor).

At the same time, however, Mr. Guttenberg’s troubles thrust into embarrassing national relief the dirty secret that to gain such credentials, many Germans, well-connected ones anyway, apparently cut corners or worse, and universities often look the other way. The minister couldn’t admit to having farmed out his dissertation, because that’s literally a crime here, but he was generally suspected of having hired someone to write the work for him (how else to explain why he seemed so blithely oblivious to the contents of his own thesis?). And to add insult to injury, his advisers had even awarded him a rank of “summa cum laude” (“Summa cum fraude” was another of those protesters’ placards), notwithstanding that the thesis seems to have poached material from one of those very advisers.

Read the whole thing says Herr Prof. Schmidt, Ph.D.

Disclaimer: Jessica Goldberg did have something to do with this post.

Das ist schlecht!

A leading German politician has to give up his doctorate due to plagiarism. Doctorates carry a lot more social importance in Germany than in the US so this is a bigger deal than it might seem at first blush.

Key lesson: If you plan a career in politics you just have to accept nowadays that everything will be checked and that everything will be watched.

Bonus question (to which I do not know the answer): I understand the "von" in German names, e.g. Friedrich von Hayek, as meaning "from" but what does it mean to be "zu" Guttenberg? Did some illustrious ancestor of this not-so-illustrious politician move to Guttenberg and do something important there?

German academic title question

On page 7 of the quarterly report of the ZEW in Mannheim (one of the major German economic research institutes) you will find a box with a statment from institute director Wolfgang Franz that lists his title as:

"Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Franz"

Franz is a fine fellow but that fact is unrelated to my question, which is, what does "h.c. mult." mean?

By the way, the "Dr. Dr." is not a typo, it means he has two doctorates.

The joy of the welfare state

The German publication Bild focuses on Arno Duebel, who at 36 [!] years and running is Germany's longest unemployed person. This piece describes a typical day and this piece his encounter with active labor market policy.

The actual mystery, though, is not the existence of someone like Arno, but rather, given the relative generosity of many European welfare states, their relative scarcity. The fact of the matter is that most people actually like to work, even at jobs that many academics might (implicitly and with a lot of jargon) sneer at. Understanding this behavior at a deeper level would do much to improve both labor economics and labor market policy.

As an aside to readers who may not be familiar with it, Bild is a sort of strange mix of People, the National Enquirer and Sports Illustrated. Reading it in a public place sends a strong social signal.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

Saving labor costs in Germany

The new kid on the business block in Germany is self-service bakeries. Unlike traditional bakeries, where a staff person assembles the desired baked goods for each customer, here the customer simply picks out the desired baked goods and then takes them to a cashier. The result, lower prices, 30 to 40 percent lower according to the one company, due to a smaller staff. Of course, there the cost is that some customers may misbehave and handle the food not with the tongs provided but with their hands. The main chains operate with a franchise model; here are the (English language) websites for two of them: back factory and backWERK (which roughly translates as "bakery factory" as well).

Should I note that labor costs are pretty high in Germany?

Hat tip: Michael Lechner

Reducing years of schooling

One of the papers I particularly liked from the conference that I attended last month at the ZEW in Mannheim last month considers an educational reform in one German state in which the number of years of schooling was reduced from 13 to 12 but with no reduction in the amount of material that was supposed to be covered.

The paper is by my friend Stefan Thomsen, who spent a few weeks here at Michigan in Fall 2009 and his Magdeburg colleague Bettina Buttner. Here is the abstract:

This paper analyzes the impact of shortening the duration of secondary schooling on the accumulation of human capital. In 2003, an educational policy reform was enacted in Saxony-Anhalt, a German state, providing a natural experimental setting. The thirteenth year of schooling was eliminated for those students currently attending the ninth grade. Tenth grade students were una ected. The academic curriculum remained almost unaltered. Using primary data from the double cohort of Abitur graduates in 2007, signi cant negative eff ects were discovered for both genders in mathematics and for females only in English. The effects on literature were not statistically signi cant.

This paper presents an interesting counterpoint to the two recent Canadian papers looking at the elimination of Grade 13 in Ontario, one by Harry Krashinsky at Toronto and the other (oddly not cited by Krashinsky) by Louis-Philippe Morin at Ottawa. The Ontario context differs from the German one in (at least) two ways. First, Grade 13 was a bit different to begin with as many students did not take a full load and/or retook courses from earlier years in order to get their averages up prior to applying to university. Moreover, when Grade 13 was eliminated some material was cut.

Oh, and if anyone knows how to get umlauts in blogger, I'd be glad to know it. Bettina is supposed to have one in her last name.

Economic methodology debates

My colleague Rudi Bachmann has been keeping track of the debate over neoclassical economics in the popular press and in the various fora where economists write about such big picture issues. He has, as well, participated in the debate in his native Germany, to the point where labor economists in Germany now ask about him once they know I am from Michigan.

Some of the material is in German but much is not. My sense is that the debate is much livelier in Germany, where it includes a separate but related competition between an older generation that still includes a lot of institutional and heterodox economists who see the local profession slipping away from their control and a younger generation of economists who want to be part of the broader international profession and to use the formal methods, both theoretical and econometric, in which they have been trained.

And I am pretty impressed that Rudi can cite Feyerabend.

GDR memories

The Guardian publishes misty memories from someone with a bad case of Ostalgie.

Nearly all treatments have heterogeneous treatment effects, even the totalitarian dictatorship treatment. No doubt the Guardian could find, if it cared to, folks who miss the good old days under Ceaucescu in Romania or Pol Pot in Cambodia. But why share them when it is so obvious that the great mass of people are far better off? Note too that the brave new world of capitalism that the author complains about is West Germany, where you get a never-ending stream of generous social assistance checks just for having a pulse, along with health care and other goodies paid for by your neighbors.

I should note too that my sense from my German economist friends who are familiar with departments in the former GDR is that the problem was not too many dismissals of socialist deadwood economics professors, but rather too few.

Gnomic culture

High culture and low culture and history all come together through Garden gnomes (can there really be 25 million of them?) in Germany.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

Movie: The Counterfeiters

I saw "The Counterfeiters" ("Die Falscher" auf Deutsch - with an umlaut over the "a" that blogger will not let me provide) on Friday night. The NYT review, which captures the spirit of the movie well, is here.

The movie is based on a real-life operation that produced counterfeit British pounds (and a few dollars and some other documents) using skilled concentration camp labor. The workers received perks and survival in exchange for their assistance.

One of the workers, Adolf Burger, wrote a book about it called "The Devil's Workshop" that I have not been able to find yet on Amazon or on Abebooks. If anyone knows where to find it I would be happy to hear about it. In the movie, and presumably in real life, Burger was a communist in the interwar years whose idealism and desire to make a martyr of himself and his co-workers is contrasted with the focus on personal survival of the other workers. I thought the movie was a bit kinder than it should have been to his sensibilities given that communism generated its own large scale mass murders elsewhere; in essense an opportunity for adding greater irony and greater depth to the movie was passed up.

Nonetheless, it is an excellent film and well worth the time spent viewing it. I found that it has lingered in my mind over the weekend and generated worthwhile reflections.