Have the coalitionists really thought this through?

In the twelve-page exploratory paper by the SPD, Greens and FDP, there is so much talk of "renewal" and "change" in the first ten lines that unsportsmanlike people break it off in shock.

People love habit and certainty, research has known that for a long time;

New things are exhausting and the talk of "getting out of your comfort zone" is only one thing for many: uncomfortable.

Thiemo Heeg

Editor in business.

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Why also?

But only if you benefit from it.

On good economic terms: if the investment generates a return in the end.

So what do the Germans get from the fact that “new beginnings” are the order of the day, that top Berlin politicians feel “committed to progress” like never before and that their new three-party alliance is even called a “progressive coalition”?

Or are these beautiful formulations really just - worse suspicion - pure political marketing of the newcomers, who raise themselves by humiliating their predecessors?

More progress than ever before?

One thing is clear: they did not invent the “challenges” that Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals all unanimously mention in the first sentence of their exploratory paper. It's about the really big social issues, in this order: climate change, digitization, securing prosperity, social cohesion and demographic change. Some of it has been on the agenda of federal governments for decades. Cohesion was already an issue for Konrad Adenauer, prosperity for Ludwig Erhard and Helmut Schmidt, and the aging of society for Helmut Kohl. So why rhetorically open the really big barrel right now, call for a new departure, more progress than ever before?

Perhaps because we are actually at the beginning of a decade that involves risks like hardly any before. And that at the same time opens up more technological opportunities than in previous decades. The consequences of climate change and the risk of new pandemics - not only believers in progress suspect that they can only be mastered with technology.

Even 100 years ago, mankind was fascinated by this thing called progress. In the “golden” twenties of the last century, which are repeatedly used as a comparison, technology and science made headway. The radio exhibition opened its doors for the first time in Berlin. Radio and television celebrated premieres. “Electricity in every device” was advertised. For some, that was far too much of a good thing, as the famous film “Metropolis” from 1927 shows, in which director Fritz Lang depicts a machine-influenced, dystopian city. This film initially fell through with the general public.

A century later, people are living in a decade that promises more InBig Datanovation than ever - and again there are worries.

The new 5G mobile communications standard, artificial intelligence, self-driving automobiles, telemedicine, big data and the cloud, applications for augmented reality, the Internet of Things, the self-organizing factory aka Industry 4.0 and, above all, digitization.

There are big buzzwords that shape the discussion, repeatedly provoke the question of what makes sense and produce fears: Do we really need all of this?

Doesn't 5G harm your health?

Isn't AI taking away people's jobs?

And doesn't big data make individuals transparent?