Germans “be good at austerity”

Everyone knows that Germans are austere.

In a great Saturday Night Live sketch last month that parodied Dominique Strauss-Kahn's recent stay at Riker's Island, Kenan Thompson summed up the conventional wisdom on the subject:

"You can't expect the rest of Europe to act like Germany," he said, posing as a Riker's prisoner with a taste for European economic stereotype. "Germans be good at being austere. That's their happy. All a German needs to smile is a half a sausage."

Funny, for sure. But what does that cultural trait mean for the German economy, Europe's largest?

With the U.S. economy sputtering and  Angela Merkel making the rounds in Washington, D.C., it's a good time as any to examine that question, and that's what David Leonhardt does today in the New York Times.

Here's his conclusion, which defies CW:

The brief story is that, despite its reputation for austerity, Germany has been far more willing than the United States to use the power of government to help its economy. Yet it has also been more ruthless about cutting wasteful parts of government.

After performing worse than the American economy for years, the German economy has grown faster since the middle of last decade. (It did better than our economy before the crisis and has endured the crisis about equally.) Just as important, most Germans have fared much better than most Americans, because the bounty of their growth has not been concentrated among a small slice of the affluent.

That's especially true in the pay department.

German wages have gone up about 30 percent since 1985. They're up just six percent in the U.S. during that same time.

Unlike the U.S. and many other European countries, Germany avoided a housing bubble.

And as Leonhardt points out, German kids have better math and science skills, its government has become more efficient, while German laws have protected unions, which helped preserve the country's middle class.

Time to pass the sausage?