When you’ve seen as many ups and downs in the ranking of countries’ economic models as I have, it’s no surprise to learn that what was considered a sure-fire recipe for success at one time is portrayed as stagnation or sclerosis a decade or two later. The perceptions amplify relatively small differences in GDP growth, as the western economies tend to exhibit the same broad trends. Still, Wolfgang Munchau’s Kaput: The end of the German miracle was surprising. (although so were my recent experiences with German trains mobile coverage).

The book – which is very well written – argues that German policymakers made some strategic bets some decades ago that have backfired significantly over time: dependence on Russian energy, underinvestment, over-reliance on parts of the manufacturing sector as China has gained ground – in electric vehicle production for example – and a failure to keep up with digital technology. It emphasises the reliance on technologies that the digital and green transitions are simply rendering redundant – the internal combustion engine prominent among them. The effectively mercantilist system of political prioritisation and finance has continued to support the country’s traditional strengths rather than anything innovative that might cannibalise those famous manufacturing companies. In fact, the list of charges is long – out-of-date skills, a labour market that cannot well accommodate expanding sources of labour supply (women, over-60s, immigrants) because of the vocational and apprenticeship structures, a weak digital infrastructure, and of course a disastrous energy policy over many years.

Is this really the end of the German miracle, or another of those episodes when what looks like a fatal weakness one decade will turn out to be just what is needed the next? As the author says in the prologue, “A British journalist and friend of mine warned me not to write this book. He said that the over-arching lesson in his professional life has never been to bet against the German economy.” The 5G is terrible and the trains are worse than ours in the UK, but German towns are still visibly more prosperous than many of their British counterparts. On the other hand, people still generally use cash – the ATM at the airport in Hamburg a while ago gave me a €100 note, which is just unimaginable in other European countries. And people aren’t using the apps so familiar to us to navigate or find a restaurant because they just won’t load over the terrible mobile networks.

So I don’t know whether the German miracle is permanently broken or not but this is an eye-opening read. And of course there’s the message Germany’s voters are about to send the country’s political establishment next month – whatever it turns out to be.

My student Aneesha gave me a book a few weeks ago before she headed off to do her PhD in energy systems at Berkeley, The Grid by Gretchen Bakke. OK, I thought, I’ll give it a try – but how well she knows me. I loved this book. It’s part history of how the electricity grid was built, part diagnosis of how it’s all going wrong, and part reflection about the net zero transition. What I loved about it was the way it links this fundamental infrastructure system to its social and cultural context.

I’ve always reckoned (eg around p 80 in here) that the provision of electricity is fundamentally social rather than technical, and the book illustrates that on every page. Who knew that Texas and Quebec have separate grids (in case they ever want to secede)? In a sign that the US is starting to become a failing state, it has”the highest number of outage minutes of any developed nation” – six hours a year compared with 11 minutes in Japan and even 51 minutes a year in Italy. Trees and squirrels account for much of this – or to put it another way, lack of maintenance.

Interestingly, the book pinpoints the separation of generation from transmission, and the arrival of wholesale electricity trading, as the start of the end. The margins in operating the grid itself are low, so maintenance got cut, while the arbitraging meant there was too much electricity trying to travel too far along the wires. Increasingly American companies, people and the military are setting up their own microgrids, including using renewables such as rooftop solar, and in the case of the military compost from kitchen waste and latrines. “They have all stopped expecting the state and the utilities to do their job.” Rugged individualism is the order of the day in getting stable access to electricity.

Highly recommended – I underlined something on pretty much every page. I’m thinking a lot about infrastructure these days. Thank you Aneesha!