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I wrote a short post about the reactions to 1. the collapse of a bridge in Germany due to poor maintenance and 2. the fact that Germany currently subsidizes the Indian metro. Contrasting the reactions of rightist cavemen on social media and leftist state media, I come to the conclusion that despite the fact that the state media is more accurate on the facts, their skewed politicized interpretation of the facts leaves the cavemen better off not reading the state media. Basically, the cavemen believe that Germany subsidizes the Indian metro to the tune of 100M€ and the state media counters that not a single cent of tax €s was send to India because the money was paid as an interest-reduced loan. I show why this argument is flawed and how we could have used a simple loan scheme to finance the maintenance of our bridges instead of funding the Indian metro, while taking on an equivalent risk exposure.
https://grauwacht.substack.com/p/midwit-media
I agree with your specific point that both sides misrepresented the true cost of the loan, and I agree with you that it's annoying how often people who should know better make these kinds of poorly-informed and/or bad-faith arguments, to the point that it's barely worth reading most media due to the low quality of the arguments.
However, I disagree with your conclusion that in this case, Weidel/the AfD is more correct than Klingebiel/the normies. You summarize Weidel's claim in your conclusion:
But the statement is only “true” in a trivial sense that these two things happened together: a bridge collapsed and a loan was issued to India. But the statement implies something completely different: bridges in Germany are collapsing because the German government spends money on foreign aid instead of proper infrastructure maintenance.
That's a statement like: “Kids in Africa are starving while 40% of Americans are obese!” This is a 100% true statement, and it's salient because it implies that kids in Africa are starving because selfish Americans are stealing the food from their mouths. But if you have just a tiny bit of knowledge about topics like economy, supply chains, argriculture and world politics, you know that these facts are not really causally linked, which is supported by historical data which shows that as obesity rates in America increased, the number of starving kids in Africa decreased. It would be more accurate to say: the more Americans eat, the fewer African kids starve! Paradoxical but true.
Similarly, German bridges collapsing is not obviously correlated with, let alone caused by, German foreign aid spending. If you want to make that argument (even implicitly, as Weidel does here), then you need to back it up with arguments, which she doesn't, and you don't either. I think there are a lot of reasons to assume this is not the case.
For one, it's not true that the two expenses are mutually exclusive. Money spent on foreign aid does not come directly out of the infrastructure maintenance budget, or vice versa. Of course it's true that the German government cannot spend an unlimited amount of money, so every additional euro spent must be either removed somewhere else, or raised through taxes or something, but that's a very thin connection. The German government spends billions on thousands of different things, and raises money in hundreds of ways. You might as well say: “The German government spends hundreds of million of euros on forestry, while bridges collapse!” but this isn't quite as salient, is it?
So realistically, these two expenses have to be judged on their merits individually. Is the amount of money spent on foreign aid too high? It's not obvious from the facts. Others have already pointed out the benefits of some foreign aid spending, including international goodwill and kickbacks in the form of industry orders which boost the German economy.
Is the amount of money spent on infrastructure maintenance too low, then? According to a spokesperson, the bridge did not collapse because there was no money budgeted for inspection or maintenance:
It's easy to conclude, with hindsight, that of course this bridge should have been maintained better, otherwise it wouldn't have collapsed. But just like the optimal amount of insurance fraud is nonzero, the optimal amount of bridges collapsing annually is nonzero. This is exactly the kind of rational argument that in particular the AfD-caveman does not understand!
All in all, I don't find this story all that convincing as a case study on why people should distrust the normie media. That doesn't mean I like the normie media, but I think if you're a caveman, you are better off listening to the midwits, who are more likely to be directionally correct and less likely to be spectacularly wrong. Of course, we should all be listening to geniuses instead. The problem is that if you're a caveman, it's very difficult to distinguish genius from midwit from fellow caveman.
It's true that the optimal amount of bridges collapsing is non-zero. But it's also true that if you're going to decide whether a particular collapsing bridge is worth it, "the optimal amount is non-zero" is the last reason you should try using to justify a collapsing bridge. Otherwise, it becomes a fully general argument for all collapsing bridges, since any collapsing bridge you might care about is a non-zero amount.
A collapsing bridge is strong evidence that something went wrong.
Come on. Do you really expect him to say "Oh, no, we didn't inspect the bridge. We didn't follow the guidelines. And nobody was surprised by this incident. Everyone in the government expected the bridge to fall down"? Of course not. Nobody's ever going to say that regardless of whether it's true. (And even if it's true, "we followed the guidelines" is just ass-covering. Nobody can put any blame on them if they followed the guidelines, right? It's entirely possible the guidelines are bad.)
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Generally if you're going to link to outside sources here, especially your own writing, we ask that you quote the entire thing and not make us go outside of the site to read.
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This just seems a classic case of export finance? As part of the agreement, the article you link in the post states, Siemens will be doing a lot of work on the project, which explains everything. Most governments do this quite a lot as an inexpensive way of boosting exports and fostering good relations abroad - India does it too! Total nothingburger.
I don't have a strong position on whether the whole thing is a good deal or not. My problem is with the way the article communicates costs by pretending that providing an interest-reduced loan isn't costly in any way. Instead, what I would expect from a supposedly neutral state media outlet is that they present the pros and cons of this policy in a neutral and factual manner.
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