Everyone happy: Living standards in Germany 25 years after reunification
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is now a quarter of a century since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the gap in living standards between eastern and western Germany is still not fully closed. Admittedly, this could not realistically have been expected. Despite the increase in life satisfaction in eastern Germany, the east-west divide prevails. Evidence of this can be found in the latest data from the long-term Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study gathered by DIW Berlin in cooperation with the fieldwork organization TNS Infratest Sozialforschung. According to the SOEP data, in 2013, eastern Germans were far less happy than western Germans, although the level of life satisfaction in the east was higher than at any other point in the history of the survey, which was conducted for the first time in eastern Germany in 1990-shortly before economic, currency, and social union. Other subjective indicators reveal differences in satisfaction with household income, health, and childcare. In contrast, job satisfaction, as well as satisfaction with housing, housework, and leisure time have converged. Eastern Germans worry more about crime levels and their own financial circumstances, whereas concerns about xenophobia and employment have diminished throughout Germany. The SOEP surveys show that, according to population, living standards in Germany are now largely aligned. Despite a number of specific problems which, in the coming years, will include the development of new pensions in eastern Germany in particular, German reunification has proven to be an extraordinary success story.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".