Comment on Norbert Berthold and Rainer Fehn “Reforming the Welfare State: The German Case”

Abstract

In these brief comments on Professor Berthold’s and Rainer Fehn’s paper I shall concentrate on raising some general issues, since I am not familiar with the details of the recent German experience. I have three such observations to make.

First, I was struck by the way in which politics and the political process are treated in the paper as “noises off.” The issues are addressed in what might be termed a “technocratic” style; that is, they are debated in a form that presupposes that achieving solutions is a matter of achieving the right technical mixture of policies. Voters are admitted briefly into the analysis, as reluctant taxpayers and in the specific context of reunification (which otherwise received far less attention in the paper than I would have expected, as an outsider). Politicians are merely irrational vote maximizers. I venture to suggest that the real position may be rather more complex, both in relation to the motivations of all those engaged in the political process and in estimating possible outcomes.