You forgot beer.
Yes. Beer!
I often think there is an element to romanticism about both German and Japanese manufacturing, and an element of either forgetting or just not appreciating American manufacturing and industry in the 20th century.
Something to keep in mind too, is Germany and Japan operated terribly inefficient manufacturing facilities basically until post-WWII. Everyone knows the U.S. was a juggernaut of industry but often assume that is just sheer size of the U.S. vs the Axis countries. In actuality during WWII the Axis countries were far less productive per laborer due to out dated and poor manufacturing processes. Germany operated on the “shop” system, as a typical example of how such a system worked a factory for tanks might be divided into a number of shops, each shop has a foreman or master mechanic who runs it. In that shop might be 3 or 4 tanks in various states of completion, the foreman oversees his crew as they work the tanks until they are finished, then they are moved out and they start on the next batch. This allows for great attention to detail and the development of real “craftsmanship” skills, but it also makes production take far longer. Cultural issues also meant that the entire factories would have “off shifts” until quite late in the war, meaning the factory would literally go dark with all the workers at home resting.
Japan was assembling lots of pieces of its equipment in residential areas in small wooden buildings and moving them around for later stage assembly. Part of this was because of U.S. bombing raids, but part too was just cultural practices that were not very efficient.
Before WWII broke out the largest and most complicated assembly lines were in the United States. The most complicated machines being built on assembly lines prior to the war had around 15,000 parts. These were being made in U.S. assembly lines, nowhere else in the world was doing this. When the large industrial concerns in the United States started to retool for war production, the largest machines (aircraft) to be built on an assembly line escalated to 200,000 parts.
This was not just the United States having more people and natural resources than Germany and Japan, it was having a fusion of business, engineering, and experience that produced a far more robust and efficient industrial system. The Germans and Japanese did a tremendous amount of copying and improving of our industrial system after the war.
The United States was actually the most productive country in the world (in terms of value added per hour of manufacturing) from the late 19th century until the 21st century. As a comparison point, in 1950 an hour worked in manufacturing in Germany produced outputs worth about 38.9% of an hour in the United States. For Japan the percentage was 16.6%.
By 1960 Germany’s had increased to 66.7%, Japan’s to 26.6%. By 1970, Germany was at 79.7% and Japan was at 49.2%. By 1980, Germany was at 95.% and Japan was at 62.6%. By 1990 Germany had fallen back to 85.9%, Japan risen to 77.9%. It’s worth noting during the peak years of America’s “Japan panic”, when everyone was afraid we were being “economically conquered” by Japanese industry, Japan was never nearly as productive as the United States.
America was not a lumbering brute economy relying on higher population and resources, it was flat out a more efficient and productive country than either of the two other shining stars of industry in that era.
My father likes to tell the story of how he had a German professor back in the day, and the professor would stalk and pace back and forth while he and the other students were taking exams, and gaze at what students were writing, and sigh and shake his head, “Stupid, stupid, stupid…”
I think that occurs in a great many countries. Over-optimistic promised are made to get the funding, and by the time reality strikes, it’s too late to walk away because of the sunk cost.
And (another side-effect of reconstruction from Year Zero) they have industry-wide unions rather than the multiplicity of trade/craft-based unions whose competing interests and efforts to maintain differentials bedevilled a number of British industries up to the Thatcher years.
They also had reliability issues, much of it stemming from the engine, transmissions, drive systems. The weight of the Tiger really taxed mechanicals. If one were disabled, it was very difficult to recover and some Tigers were stripped down somewhat to be used as recovery vehicles to tow disabled ones. They used the same Maybach engine that the lighter ( but still very formidable ) Mk 5 ( Panther ) tank used.
I once worked for a German company and was quite taken aback to learn that the head of management was also the head of the labour union. This was at a time when the UK was wracked by industrial turmoil with management facing off labour unions. Political tension, strikes every day, the UK was in a mess. Germany, in contrast was prosperous and stable.
I was impressed to note that he took his responsibilities for worker welfare very seriously. It was a long term paternalistic approach that you sometimes get in businesses embedded in a community with a stable leadership. But this relies on a conformity and acceptance of authority that comes from the culture. There is a cost to that.
Having said that, I was in one of the most socially conservative parts of Germany. The Swabians do everything by numbers. Germany has many local cultural identities because it was a lot of small countries and only unified into a nation state in 1871. It benefits from a Constitution that was written in 1949. As you might imagine, quite a lot of thought went into getting it right.
That’s a bonafide jerk there.
They did. IIRC there was much debate about it (I took a tour of the hall a couple of years ago - and the guide pointed out all the variations in the wooden acoustic claddings - I did a blogpost about it, with some photos of them).
Mercedes: Das Beste oder nichts
They actually think this is a positive trait and pretend it is a quotation from Gottlieb Daimler.
Green: no affiliation
Red: Roman catholic
Blue: Protestants. The smallest of the three
Well, apart from Beer, medicine, irrigation, health, roads, cheese and education, baths and the Circus Maximus, what have the Romans Germans ever done for us? Oh, and Beckenbauer, of course, though he is a bit of a surprise there at 0.30’.
I can respect the idea of doing the best job you can, or not doing it at all. But their conception of “best” is flawed in this case.
I actually saw this a lot when I was a programmer; too many programmers get hung up on making technically brilliant code, when the right long-term answer is something more technically mundane, but far easier to understand and document.
I probably went a little overboard with the use of superlatives like greatest music and forgetting that Mozart is from Salzburg.
I know several inventions that are a result of contemporaneous research by scientists in different countries.
Made in Germany always had that ring of quality to it.
I was king in my elementary school if I possessed a Staedtler pencil and sharpener. 
When I was little, Made in England, Made in Germany and Made in the USA were the marks of quality.
Made in China makes me cringe still as back in the day it was it was associated with shoddy except Hero Pens and Tiger Balm.
Funny when Made in China rules the world and there is no way out.
There is no doubt that in the 19 cent., Germany led the world in mathematics. The theory, not the applications. Gauss at the beginning of the century, Riemann in the middle and Hilbert along with Cantor, Hausdorff, Klein towards the end. But with the aging of Hilbert, their pre-eminence was coming to an end by the 1920s. And then all the best ones left, most coming to the US. Also by that time, there was Poincaré in France and, strong Italian and Hungarian schools. The eminence has not returned.
I just want to echo the sentiment that a list of inventions and discoveries can be misleading.
Because firstly, there have been a lot of such developments. Even countries that most people don’t think of as one of the big powers, like Denmark or the Netherlands can reel off fairly long lists.
And secondly, most inventions actually took incremental steps and collaboration, so several nations can claim the same invention as “theirs”.
This is a good example. Yes the WWW was an excellent development and TBL deserves credit. But the suggestion made in various places that we wouldn’t have the internet now were it not for him is just nonsense. There were a lot of very important, and difficult, developments before and after.
Pull out any of those pieces and…it would cost time, but not mean we would still be hooking computers together with serial cables now.
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Regarding the OP, in the modern era one crucial difference is the apprenticeship system in Germany, and respect for precision engineering.
Here in the UK, and much of the Western world, vocational qualifications are still looked down upon compared to academic qualifications. Accordingly, we have a very service-oriented economy* here and comparatively weak engineering sector. There’s also something of a market failure, where employers complain about the lack of skilled engineers, and yet salaries for mechanical engineers remain lackluster.
* …which of course could be turned on its head. We could point to the UK’s robust financial sector and ask why Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is comparatively weak in this area.
Lord, spare me from “brilliant” coders.
Kernighan’s Law
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
It’s been impressive in a way to see the much cheaper but still quite high quality Chinese-made optics start to muscle in on the likes of the excellent but very expensive Zeiss, Swarovski, and Leica in the world of high-end binoculars. Back when I followed such things, I also noticed the same thing was happening in the field of pricey audiophile electronics.
High-end products at middle-end prices. It’s a very successful undercutting strategy even at the level of luxury items. You don’t usually get the same quality warranties and such, but you get a quality very close to elite at much lower than elite prices.
No it did not. The label was imposed on German products by the British, who wanted the people of Britain (and the USA!) to know they were buying an inferior product. That was back in the 1880’s.
Made in Japan was considerd cheap and bad until the 1970’s.
And I guess in 40 years time “Made in China” will be a sign of quality and craftmanship. “Made in Vietnam” will be the bad thing to be.