W. Edwards Deming was an American statistician whose work on statistical quality control was largely ignored at home after the war and taken up in Japan, where the highest industrial quality award still carries his name. American industry rediscovered him in the 1980s, by which time the argument had to be made as a foreign import.
history
Let’s Make a Deal
An American game show first broadcast in 1963 and still running. The title is the premise. A country that has televised deal-making continuously for sixty years has a settled view of it.
The mark imposed in 1887
The words Made in Germany were imposed on German goods by the British Merchandise Marks Act of 1887, intended as a warning to consumers that the product was foreign and inferior. Within a generation it had become the opposite. An insult was turned into the most valuable country-of-origin mark in the world.
The liberal arts degree
American undergraduate education requires breadth before depth — a major taken alongside distribution requirements across sciences, humanities and social sciences. A graduate is expected to have studied several fields, and employers hire from any of them into most roles.
The discount law
Das Rabattgesetz. From 1 January 1934 until 25 July 2001, German law restricted the discounts a retailer could give a consumer. Section 2 capped the cash discount at 3 percent of the price.
Germany was the only country in the European Union with a general prohibition on discounts — the government’s own bill said so when proposing repeal. The stated purpose was to stop customers being tempted too strongly by the size of a reduction.
A seventy-year-old law existed on the premise that a price is a fact, and that moving it around is a trick played on the buyer.
The planned economy
Germany has an unusually loaded relationship with the word, given the twentieth century, and Planwirtschaft is used as a criticism of excessive central planning. The suspicion attaches to planning as an economic system. It does not attach to planning as professional practice, and Germans hold both views without difficulty.
Trade and change
Trade and change — a fixed German pairing for commercial life as a whole, in use since the Middle Ages. The rhyme yokes commerce to movement and mutual dealing. It describes trade as something that circulates between people rather than as something extracted by one from another.
Planned obsolescence
The phrase entered American public argument through Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers in 1960, and the underlying idea had been discussed in American industry decades earlier. The country produced both the practice and the word for criticising it.
The New Objectivity
In June 1925 Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim, opened an exhibition called Neue Sachlichkeit: Deutsche Malerei seit dem Expressionismus. The name stuck to an entire era.
Hartlaub described the artists as those who had retained or regained their fidelity to positive, tangible reality. Otto Dix put it more bluntly: they wanted to see things quite naked, clearly, almost without art.
It was a reaction against Expressionism — against the mystical, the subjective, the utopian. A culture that names an art movement after objectivity has a strong relationship with the idea.
Federalism by agreement
German federalism requires agreement between the federal government and the states across broad areas of legislation, through a second chamber composed of state governments. The constitution obliges the levels to reach terms. A majority is frequently not enough.