MUCH of the rich world is fascinated by Germany. Despite being at the heart of sclerotic Europe, its GDP per head has risen by more than any other G7 country’s over the past decade. Unemployment in the troubled euro zone is at its highest since the single currency’s birth; in Germany it is at a record low. In most rich countries manufacturing exports have been hammered by foreign competition; in Germany they remain powerful drivers of growth. No wonder hard-pressed political leaders in France, Spain, Italy and Britain are talking wistfully of becoming more like Germany.

        So what should Europe’s weaker countries be trying to copy? The relaxation of labour-market rules, certainly. That is beginning to happen, though as Italy has been discovering , liberalising labour markets is harder in tough economic times. Germany freed up its job market when demand was strong in the rest of Europe. There is also much to be said for emphasising vocational training instead of producing more and more graduates with often useless university degrees. But many of the things that work well in Germany—its corporatism, its business clusters, its manufacturing prowess—are part of a traditional culture that would be hard, if not impossible, to transplant from one country to another.

           Above all, the country’s hair-shirt philosophy that favours austerity over growth, saving over spending, and foreign over domestic demand has often been damaging. It has held down Germans’ living standards (despite faster growth, personal consumption has risen by less than in the rest of Europe over the past decade). And it has been catastrophic for the rest of the euro zone as Germany has acted, in effect, as a drag on demand. Investors who sold off Spanish and Italian bonds this week were worried as much about the effects of excessive austerity as about public-debt levels. Germany’s reliance on exports has led to huge current-account surpluses that have been matched by deficits elsewhere, a big contributor to the euro crisis.