As many of you know, I visited the USA this year and would like to share my experiences with you here. This will not be a travelogue, but a somewhat more in-depth collection of thoughts on mainly economic topics.
In this respect, the first thing I noticed was that the USA has been using the technologies we always talk about here for a long time. Delivery robots, for example, are already very present on the streets of the big cities. An even bigger highlight were the rides with Google's Waymo autonomous cab service, which we will probably have to wait another 15+ years for in Germany. In the USA, if a robot can do the job reliably, why should a human do it? No consideration is given to whether a 15€/h occupational therapy for some unskilled worker could be eliminated.
Furthermore, the USA really is a great service society. Service and "the customer is king" are capitalized everywhere. The German attitude of "I don't give a damn how the customer is doing, I don't own the company" doesn't exist in America. Everything is really carried after you there, even in fast food restaurants there is table service and they really try to cater to special requests. Of course, as is typical in the USA, people hope for tips, which are not expected in most cases except from waiters.
The high wage level of Americans is also striking. My charming girlfriend, for example, would earn about twice as much in the USA as she does here. Overall, you can clearly feel that you are in a country with economic growth in the USA. You can really see large construction sites everywhere, where entire streets and districts are being rebuilt from scratch - whereas in Germany I have noticed for years that some highway lanes are closed for years without a single person working there. You also don't see anywhere that housing is being created on a large scale, although there has been a shortage of living space for years.
Overall, the economy is not doing as well as it could be, and it is clear that this is why there is increasing dissatisfaction with Trump. Nevertheless, the mood is optimistic and cannot be compared with the doomsday mood in Merz Germany.
Speaking of Merz, the "cityscape" in America is actually very similar to that in Germany - only with a much greater police presence. We felt very safe overall as a result. For the "little boy" in me, it was also a great thing to see all the cool emergency vehicles. But it's still a stark contrast to East Asia (where we've also been) where I couldn't even tell you what the police look like because they don't need to be anywhere and yet everyone obeys the law. That's how it used to be here too, I've heard.
The bottom line is that most things now work better in America than they do here. The only tangible disadvantage is the supermarkets in the USA, which are generally more expensive and the processed food is riddled with dangerous additives. In the USA, the rule is that you can put anything in your food if it is not yet clear that it is harmful. I think that's a completely crazy idea. Deregulation is great, but when it comes to health, "better safe than sorry". Here, for once, I like the European philosophy of preferring to regulate when there is uncertainty - and even here, enough unhealthy things are still allowed. In contrast to this, the USA also has very fresh fruit and vegetables and healthy foods that you would look for in vain in this country.
The USA is simply a country that is much more prone to extremes than Germany. In Europe, nobody is doing badly, but almost nobody is doing really well either. In Germany, the tendency is towards mediocrity. That wouldn't be a bad thing in itself, but the overall average in Europe is lower than in America, which is a problem. More equality is a justifiable concept in itself. But not if it means that conditions are not good for everyone and people still celebrate the fact that it is at least not "unfair". In the area of health, for example, it is the case in the USA that some people receive world-class medical treatment and others (almost) none at all. But in Germany, the majority simply get the benefits of the statutory health insurance, which are subterraneanly bad, while the average middle-class American spends less than 17% of their gross salary on health and is still treated like a real person and not like a piggy bank that just needs to be slaughtered.
