Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…She was certainly aware of that. She talks about that in her biography as well and in later interviews. It’s certainly something that was going around her mind. As I say, not in an obvious way in the way that, say, as a feminist, you’d go in, and you’d deliberately try and rail against what you would see as a male environment. I don’t think it was that she went in there as an East German and said, “I’m facing a West German establishment here. I need to be particularly aware of this.” I think it was almost like she was trying to blend into that a bit more, to scale down her East Germaness and to try and basically adapt to the culture that she found, rather than providing an obvious counterpoint to that. There’s a common claim. I don’t know how true it is, but that many East Germans still today are somewhat resentful or upset because they feel pushed out of leadership positions in business, in culture, in media, often in politics. Do you think that’s true? It’s not just subjective. The figures point to that. I haven’t got the exact figure in my mind now, but there was a book that came out at the same time as mine by Dirk Oschmann called Der Osten: eine westdeutsche Erfindung—The East is an Invention of the West, in which he brings out some really quite stark figures. One of them is something like 1.4 percent or so of leadership positions across the board—politics, economics, everything—are occupied by East Germans. Given that East Germans make up about a fifth of the population, that’s astonishingly low. This isn’t just a subjective feeling that East Germans have. They are genuinely not part of the conversation in proportion to the amount of people that they provide in society.…

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