Amateur economics

Some things, like milk and meat and vegetables, are more expensive in Germany than in New Zealand. Some things, like books and cell phones and booze, are cheaper. On average the costs for various goods and services seem roughly the same.

And the standard of living in Germany -- by blunt economic measure, the amount of these goods and services that the average person consumes -- seems roughly the same as well. It makes you wonder where all Germany's extra $10,261 GDP per capita goes. A recent theory of mine (caveat: real Germans are skeptical) suggests that it goes to provide the average German citizen with perhaps three years more "holiday" time -- in the form of education and society-sanctioned leisure -- than is enjoyed by the average New Zealander.

The evidence, at least, is friendly: Germans start school a year older; they have the same total thirteen years; German guys then have a year of compulsory civil service, which some German girls choose to do too. Then, for those intending to go to university eventually, the gap-year tradition is also more firmly entrenched. And so (I discovered to my surprise at Maths Orientation), most first-year university students are 20 or 21 -- older than me. They then stick around uni longer, since most degrees -- science, arts, law -- take five years rather than four or three (although this is changing). So by the time they start "proper jobs", Germans will be considerably older than their New Zealand counterparts.

(My German friends have tended to rubbish this theory, instead blaming the discrepancy on European Union membership fees or on support payments to the old East Germany.)

Even if it doesn't singlehandedly reduce German's standard of living to that of New Zealand, the older student population does have one noticeable effect: the student residences are clearly built to house semi-adults rather than teenagers. The bedrooms are much bigger. They're also much emptier, and furnished by their tenants. The walls are thicker. (Fortunately.) Kitchens are provided, to be cleaned by student elbow-grease, and students cook (or not) for themselves. The university authorities act more like normal landlords would -- you lease a room for six months at a time, with first dibs on the room when the lease ends, so that students often never move out of their initial spot. When they go, they often leave things behind, which no one bothers to dispose of; hence the collections of kitchen utensils in the cupboards are really extensive, and so are the collections of junk on the balcony.
It's very comfortable, and I can't help wishing the New Zealand government would make similar efforts to provide cheap and efficient and easy housing for its youth.