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It is time to talk about the Joneses and why we bother trying to impress them. I am of course talking about the phenomenon known as “keeping up with the Joneses” or the tendency to ‘spend money you don’t have to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like’.

I have written earlier in the year about the challenge the energy transition faces in terms of geopolitical dependency. Many of the metals we need to build windmills, energy storage facilities, EVs, etc. are coming from a handful of countries. And let’s face it, these countries are typically not very stable or particularly friendly to European and North American importers. But have we thought about comparing these geopolitical dependencies to our dependencies in fossil fuels?

Germany is one of the countries that has introduced a debt brake into its constitution. Basically, it says that the German government must balance its budget in the medium term and can only run excess deficits in times of emergency. Ironically, this has backfired recently when the German constitutional court struck down the 2024 budget and forced the government into austerity right at the height of a recession. Yet, the debt brake remains very popular with Germans as a new analysis shows.