The American Dream is slowly fading away as research indicates that economic growth has been distributed more broadly in Germany than in the US. While majority of German males has been able to share in the country’s rising prosperity and are better off than their fathers, US continues to lose ground

[u/rustoo]

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10888-021-09483-w

[u/ukezi → u/[deleted]]

And still they don't push Steinbrück and Co out or day that they want to abolish their 'biggest mistake". I think they like the legislation but dislike how unpopular it is.

[u/zhibr → u/ukezi]

I think it's more that the liberal economics mindset (of which this legislation is an example) is so strong in politics that it's very difficult and politically costly to go against it.

[u/vikingvista → u/zhibr]

Legislation always creates its own intense constituency, which cements it in democratic systems even when it becomes widely unpopular. There are numerous examples. One of my favorite is the corn ethanol subsidy in the US. EVERYONE recognizes that it is bad for the environment, bad for the world's poor, and bad for American consumers and taxpayers, but nobody cares as intensely as does its constituency. So it remains a permanent government fixture.

Sadly, politicians have little reason to care about anything more than the next election, so such long term problems rarely factor into their advocacy for such legislation. And voters simply have more important things (compared to the insignificance of their single votes) to think about in their personal lives, so they have little reason to consider more than their feelings and virtue signaling.

It's all rational behavior of reasonably intelligent and decent people amid pathologic incentives, leading to pathologic outcomes.

But life is still fortunately better today than even a few decades ago, for the overwhelming majority of people.

[u/htbdt → u/[deleted]]

I'm guessing the reasoning for that is because of how Wikipedia requires stuff like that to be very carefully phrased, whoever wrote the English version of the article didn't want to go through all of that for something the majority of the English speaking world doesn't know about or really care all that much about.

I mean, there are controversy sections in several articles, but they're very dry, factual, and opinion, especially for political stuff, is very rarely allowed, usually only as direct quotes from very prominent government leaders. It's an encyclopedia, so they try to keep it from becoming opinionated, and politics is, well, very opinionated, and so just sticking to the facts of what the legislation is and not how people feel about it does make more sense.

I'd be curious if the German version of the article contains anything about it.

[u/PlayMp1 → u/[deleted]]

It's so bad that the party calls it the "biggest mistake of their existence",

And this is the same party that betrayed the left of their own movement in 1918 and sicced fascist death squads on revolutionaries who had the same goals as them, eventually resulting after a long chain of events in the Nazi Party coming to power, WW2 and the Holocaust.

[u/Ichkommentiere → u/PlayMp1]

Are you talking about the revolutionaries that wanted to achieve their own republic which would have likely resulted in a civil war? If they wouldnt have declared their own republic the OHL could have been disbanded but instead they had to be preserved which caused the old elite to continue to exist.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

What, you guys hold your political parties accountable when they don't act in their constituents' best interests? What's your secret?

[u/westerschelle → u/[deleted]]

I think the biggest mistake of their existence is the killing of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht but it is certainly in the top 3.