To be fair, the article has this paragraph:

Some aspects of health provision, child care and schooling in pre-1989 German Democratic Republic were seen as taboo in the west for a decade after unity because of their communist roots. But they are now recognised as valuable policy guides. For instance, decentralised health centres that reduce the need for hospital visits - introduced in 2004 as part of national health reforms - were modelled on similar clinics in the east.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Hey Jérôme; and I am the one making overstatements ? ;)
Please take no  offence, but in my view radical revisionism is a little bit of an hyperbole. Plus revisionism is a world bearing a historical connotation. Careful use advised.

Once again, this is not criticism of the whole subject, which I think is worth raising and debating, but the form matters as well.  

When through hell, just keep going. W. Churchill

as you did not quote the source (the Financial times), I thought the word revisionism was your writing.

When through hell, just keep going. W. Churchill

To summarise: business likes workers poor, desperate and downtrodden. And they call this a newspaper?

Yeah, and if the East is so bright, how is it that people moved to the West in droves, and GDP growth in the last year was less than in the West?...

Second Easter Utopia entry: Slovakia. I dissed the supposed flat tax wonderland spin already, but here is some new input: the extremely high Q4/2005 GDP growth of 7.5%, upon analysis by financial institute SLSP, proved to be a 6% 'natural' growth, with another 1.5% added by speculative filling-up of inventories (for example cigarette sellers) - and this is expected to result in a reduction of early 2006 growth.

For comparison, in the Czech Republic, which does not have flat tax, Q4/2005 growth was found to have been 6.9%. However, there too, capitalism is on the march: the inflation-corrected growth of earnings was lowest since independence.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

yes you get to 'choose' whether to dig potatoes or rutabagas.

sorta like in the states you get to choose between working at burger king or wendy's.

it's great to be free, ain't it!

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

worth quoting:

While dozens of airport companies in Germany and elsewhere competed for DHL's investment of €300m ($357m, £206m), only a few met these conditions. "In the end Leipzig was the best," says Mr Reinboth, noting that the project is among the largest in post-unification east Germany.

Both labour flexibility and the political will of regional government officials to organise the guarantees, in spite of some local protests, played a role in the investment decision. State subsidies were not crucial to the deal, he insists.

Even though the "jobs themselves are not very attractive" - low-skilled work unloading and reloading aircraft outdoors in the middle of the night - 30,000 people have applied.

As part of a trend common across east Germany, the company struck an "in-house" agreement with a local trade union, ensuring that wages will be 20 per cent below the rates DHL pays in west Germany (see chart).

Access to flexible workers also plays a role for companies locating in Schwerin, 360km north of Leipzig, says Daniela See, director of a Premiere pay-television call centre in the historic city. Average monthly wages for telephone "agents" in the region are only €1,400 but this hardly deters applicants, says Ms See during a tour of the centre, which employs 420 people. "Some of my staff used to work in the local leather factories, others in engineering companies. They are all thirsty to learn, because work is rare."

Harald Ringsdorff, premier of the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where Schwerin is located, agrees that economic difficulties in the east are behind the labour flexibility. "Higher living standards in the west make people there very choosy about job opportunities," he says.

Low wages play a lesser role in parts of the east's strongest growth centres in the states of Saxony and Thüringia, where manufacturing jobs per head now outnumber those in several western regions. Yet even there, flexibility counts. Some 122,000 people in Thüringia - every eighth employed resident - commute to work in a neighbouring region, mostly to Bavaria and Hesse in the west.

"Such readiness to go that extra mile to find work could be a lesson to the west," says Michael Behr of Jena university.

Why don't they just send in some thugs to round up anyone who looks strong and able-bodied and put them in work camps?

This New Victorianism - the relentless promotion of Dickensian working practices promoted with a rhetoric of 'flexibility' and 'lessons for the West' - is the most disturbing thing I've read this year.

In the east, in contrast, a shortage of jobs has made employees more willing to move house or work longer hours for lower pay, fewer holidays and less protection from wage bargaining agreements. That in turn has boosted the region's business appeal.

Last year I came across a Czech government brochure intended for the chemical industry in which they boasted Czechia's "cheap labour force". And this was a social-democratic government. With friends like these, workers don't need enemies.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman

The FT did publish this article on Monday (but for strange reason, it was very hard to find it on their website):

Middle-aged and stranded by the `new economy'

By Richard Sennett

In the last generation, wealth has stagnated for workers in the middle of the economy even as those at the top have, famously, become even richer and, an unsung achievement, many poor workers have increased their wealth share. Stagnating wages are the main cause; in the US, for example, the middle quintile is barely better off than it was 15 years ago. Though property values have increased, this asset is hard to access for ordinary income; to gain traction as consumers, mid-level families in the US and Britain have piled up debts, while middle-class Europeans have not done much better.

For this slice of society, stagnation has become intertwined with insecurity. Work has taken on a new character in recent decades for people in the middle; its risks are especially evident among those whose fortunes are tied to the "new economy" - cutting-edge, global businesses such as financial services, media and high-tech. They account for no more than 20 per cent of US and 15 per cent of British employment but in them, modern capitalism has concentrated its energies and defined its ideals.

The new economy has reformulated workers' experience of time. Long service and accumulated experience do not earn the rewards that more traditional companies once provided. Instead, cutting-edge businesses want young employees who can work long hours; the "youth premium" works against older employees with multiple responsibilities. (...)

Meanwhile, time has been transformed throughout the economy as the security net of benefits has torn. Thirty years ago, industrial labourers were menaced when plants went bust; today uncertain pensions and healthcare have become middle-class problems. The risks of space have compounded those of time. A generation ago the work exported to low-wage countries were routine, manual jobs; today, computer programming and architectural engineering can be profitably exported to India, China and Brazil.

Instability can be an opportunity - if you have real wealth to invest, or are young and unattached, or an immigrant exploring cracks in the labour force. If you are dutiful but not brilliant at work, if you have children and a mortgage, if you are worried about old-age hardship, then instability does not equal opportunity.

How did the middle slice of workers wind up in this fraught position? After the breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreements in the early 1970s, a sea of capital flooded the world and it was "impatient capital", in the words of Bennett Harrison, the economist, capital looking for short-term returns on share prices rather than longer-term dividends on profits. (...) To turn a business around quickly, the command centre must be able to act decisively without bureaucratic muffling. Modern technologies have helped companies strip out their middle layers of bureaucracy, and so shorten the chain of command.

(...) More important, the short-term, lean, high-tech company has become the sex symbol of the business world. Mid-level, middle-aged, stable workers detract from the allure: they appear in managerial manuals devoted to the new economy as "ingrown bureaucrats" who are "resistant to change". A company can sex itself up practically by replacing mid-level bureaucracy with technology, by exporting technical work to low-wage countries, or simply by enforcing a work ethos in which all employees are treated as young, unencumbered and driven.

(...)

That both men and women worry about failing their families was a key finding - this spectre once haunted manual labourers but has now migrated to the middle-class. Manual labourers had strong unions to turn to; white-collar unions are weak or non-existent in the new economy.

People in the middle, both young and old, grasp at the idea that "skills" will somehow defend them against the risks of the modern workplace. Yet, young people know that the education system turns out many more qualified graduates than there are jobs. (...)

Politicians have not taken on board, I think, the crisis of the work ethic for those in the middle, an ethic that turns on institutional loyalty and reliability in providing for the family - an ethic that requires political programmes to ensure continuity and durability in middle-class life, to countervail against the new economy.

I'd quote the full article, which is really excellent, but that's already a lot. The guy's book (The Culture of the New Capitalism, published this week by Yale University Press) must be interesting.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Willingness to move? Yup, right out of the new Laender. The pattern for the new Laender since unification has generally been a lower birth rate and a steady migration to the old Laender of young adults. Given the choice people tend to prefer better jobs for more money and less work. The new Laender of course also have higher unemployment. Yup, that's an economic utopia for you - create conditions that give you higher unemployment, stagnant growth, lower wages, and massive population loss. Push your best qualified young people to move away.  

How crazy do you have to be to see E. Germany as an economic success story?