What I find so astonishing about this recent US "debate" is that I was taught in my German high school during the 1980s in a discipline called "Erdkunde" that the US is transitioning from a manufacturing to a service-oriented economy that would be vastly superior to the classical manufacturing-based approach and that Germany would need to make this transition, too, if we wanted to remain globally competitive.

I don't want to glorify German high schools but I find it hard to believe that those school books were so wrong that 40 years later it would make sense to return to a manufacturing-oriented economy.