Rich and poor – the inequality gap (2/3) | DW Documentary

a charity gala auction in Berlin if the luxury watch goes for a good price a Berlin children's home will get a new sports field millionaire co-organizer Christoph Cunha urges the wealthy guests at the auction to dig deep who wants to buy Leonel messes golden boot and with it the virtuous feeling of helping children [Music] we the people who drive things forward who have the possibilities the time the money we must get involved we have one of the best countries in the world with the best opportunities so let's help to create equal and fair opportunities for children thank you very much for six months Christophe Cunha let us record him on his day to day activities thanks to him and others the resulting film gives an insight into today's society in Germany at first glance Germany is a rich and powerful country full of opportunities but if you look closely even in this industrialized country the wealth is very unequally distributed success often depends on where you come from but why should it be that way do these great differences threaten social cohesion to get some answers we talked to some of the leading academics around the world who have specialized in the issue of inequality including Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz today people says that the control of their nation is being stolen from inequality is the most pressing social problem facing us today welcome to the land of inequality [Music] Kleist off burner keeps getting richer benefits if you an app if you have 250 million euros you can throw it out the window and it'll come back through the door you can buy cars and real estate that increase in value you buy gold and the gold price goes up you can't destroy money through consumption Luna earns his money in real estate his company says he is behind every third new apartment in lighting alone we built or renovated everything you see he's worked hard to get at the top [Music] I always go to work if I have a herniated disk a 40-degree fever if my wife and I have a fight night on sleep I still work the next day finish better so does his success automatically rub off on his children can you actually buy life opportunities in Germany Berlin 6:00 a.m. while other fathers are waking their children up this millionaire is working up a sweat during an early morning workout [Music] Kona's everyday life is strictly regulated time is money and that can be added to anywhere even in the car where he turns the backseat into an office cloner sees his assistant anjali glazier almost every day but his four children usually only at the weekends as a father you naturally try to get the best for your children a child that attends a regular school still needs a lot from their parents during the week that's where I fail completely so what I've done with my children and it's probably more honest is to tell them I won't be around from Monday to Friday so I can't give them the attention they might need during that time they'll be under the best supervision somewhere else sending your children to a boarding school perhaps gives them a better chance of getting a good education then school children who live at home under kinder know no man should happen Christophe Cunha doesn't want his children to appear in this film two of them go to an elite boarding school in another city the school fees are three thousand euros a month per child three thousand euros per month few families have that much even to live on four thousand people live in these high-rise blocks known as the vices eat lung in Berlin's noid Cone district mostly large families in two to three room apartments sixty percent of them are on welfare children who grow up here usually go to the zonin Elementary School 93% of the children there do not have to pay for their books because their parents are poor these have been known as problems calls for years but no one has done anything about it a Jew in China and she would mom good morning everyone [Music] full Ausmus yeah what should you pay attention to when you write a caption for your holiday picture your hands a full stop after a sentence no exactly all but two children in garages Tamiya's fourth-grade class have foreign roots she sets them a written topic my best experience on holiday you can also write something about it first and then draw a picture sunders called me she said we should meet during the holidays I had a tournament we came for me and my parents went to etiquette supermarkets I got a Kinder Surprise and then we went back home [Music] this is my breakfast but you can have some too Stephanie Freitag is a teaching assistant she's there to help with tasks settle disputes and go on school trips when a teacher is off sick for a long time and we don't have enough staff then it makes me sad if the children don't have lessons they don't learn anything I can manage up to the fifth grade we're also doing something nice aren't we right well I like that those who speak little German at home need more support there are currently four vacancies for teachers at the school I want to become a civil engineer because I want to earn a lot of money because that's what my father does and you have to be good at math I want to graduate from high school I want to study I want to become a doctor because I like helping people just a quarter of the children here will make it to high school in the rest of Berlin it's almost twice as many they do have their big dreams and goals but they may not always know how to achieve them because they somehow don't know the way or it's sometimes closed off swooosh Manson's head teacher Karolina Pocomoke URI would like to hire more teachers but she only has a little more money to spend than she would have at a school where all the children spoke German and nobody was poor what the children need and hire the people to provide that then things would be completely different also the people who live here can't afford a lot and when we look at what the children need whether it's a healthy diet or more exercise or proper work materials which costs a lot of money ah forget there are so many factors that determine everyday life in class that you can't even describe it in words just man mid-war and ask a nice song Brian come on - Kenna Ave I know parents who don't send their children to this school at all they group together and send their children to a school farther away or they even ask the schools to open separate classes for their groups of children Jimmy this is all social segregation to me soon social segregation in this context is the spatial separation of rich and poor what happens when those on top and those down below drift further and further apart economists and social scientists all over the world are looking for answers and investigating the consequences of inequality one of them is Berlin based educational researcher Marcel hellbitch in a recent study he discovered that in Germany the rich and poor increasingly keep to themselves and hardly ever meet our study looked at 73 cities especially in terms of social segregation and we concluded that social segregation has actually increased in all but six or seven of them in states of Goethe's one example is Berlin unemployment and child poverty are decreasing in the north of Nikon and Coit Berg whereas almost two-thirds of the people in the vises eat lung tower blocks get help from the state [Music] in the horror area the a40 divides the city of Essen north of the motorway seventeen percent of adults are on social welfare whereas south of the a40 the figure is only seven percent in many cities in Germany we see these pockets in certain neighborhoods where 70 to 80 percent of the children live off benefits for the schools this means a concentration of the social problems that go with that the education system has to struggle with this every day Dom it immerses butum system you talk of snow your kin from not only our rich and poor meeting less and less it's also becoming increasingly likely that children with and without immigrant backgrounds will go to separate schools this is an experiment involving two schools in Essen in orange t-shirts an elementary school in the far more affluent southern part of the city and in blue t-shirts children from a school in the poorer north of Essen the children have to ask each other a single question the pupils from Essen north ask each other are you a foreigner [Music] studies show that children growing up amongst many poor people or immigrants will most probably underachieve Makonnen does extreme we can precisely tell which children will have which chances we can work out the probabilities and I would know exactly where to send a social education worker or a good teacher if I had one so in particular when you look at children who move or who were randomly offered a chance to move to a better neighborhood through an affordable housing program they end up doing far better than the children who didn't have that opportunity showing directly that this can't just be about differences in ability or about genes Germany aims to provide education that doesn't depend on parents wealth the state uses taxpayers money to ensure that all children go to good daycare centers and good schools it also offers opportunities to those who have few but what if the state doesn't stick to that [Music] Kristof greener a millionaire and father feels he has a duty from a good home and the education policy is substandard your parents can help with that I think you have a bad home but a good school then the school can lessen the impact of the bad home but it's failed everywhere we've got parents who don't care and don't get their act together have an education policy with the doors wide open to the chaos we see today the entrepreneur is on his way to the Laughing hearts foundation for disadvantaged children it supports around 2,000 children in 22 care homes Ghana wants to see what's become of the money they donated and to initiate new projects here for example everything was full of concrete so we had the concrete ripped out and created a place where children like to spend time and don't hit their heads on the hard surfaces Kona takes one project at a time paying for tutoring dental braces and sports fields and all of it in addition to running his business could see you can do charitable work and get your homework done a small amphitheater will be built here for me it'll be a dream come true sometimes you feel like sitting on the floor and just playing you have to be careful in the job I do you can't just sit there and play because you know you're our real heroes thank you isten who needs the most time financial resources and support from children you can't save a poor old person although you can't alleviate the circumstances they live in but with a young person or a child you can still set the course in a sponsored this sports film for 100,000 euros many children here are under the guardianship of the youth welfare office and can't be filmed so it's fun to play here it's working out it's fun the girls from the children's home have rehearsed a dance for the event as a thank-you could I just have everyone's attention for a second I want to tell you some important information this field is here we created it because we believe in you children and we'll do everything in our power to make your play time as much fun as other children's play time we believe in you and we'll always be here to do these kinds of things if it becomes clear in a society that the richer people have much better opportunities than the poorer it also affects those in between the middle classes if they can no longer rely on the state to offer opportunities to all children no matter where their school or nursery is it has far-reaching consequences then the pressure grows to do the best possible for the children in Germany a family with two children is middle-class if they have a gross monthly income of between three and five thousand euros like the class family from Leipzig thomas klaus picks up his children Gustav and Louisa from the nursery a big topic at the moment is which school Gustav should go to we would like you and your child to join us for preschool in the periods from December to February we're offering your child a weekly preschool lesson so we can start school really start that's cool isn't it the school you're coming to you can also come with us it says only your child but you are our child too the children can grow up in comfort thanks to Thomas's job the engineer works only five minutes bike ride away from home they can afford an apartment in a good location but it's been clear for some months now that his company wants to save money and that entire plants are under threat possibly his as well so there we are we all thought we were part of the big operation and then some lawyer tells us we aren't I see a huge risk that we'll be left standing here empty-handed then we'll have lost if we're just ripped out of here without any control over it then we're really facing total defeat here in live scene as chairman of the Leipzig plants works Council Thomas Klaus travels to the Siemens headquarters in Munich where the managers want to announce their savings plans it's an end to the rumors everything in black and white I have two children and I also have plans for the future and they are largely based on a future with my good job at Siemens and now it's all up in the air when that future is no longer there then I'm on shaky ground it's a bit like the road to the slaughterhouse should be very emotional where does the middle-class fear of sliding down the social ladder come from for a long time the German middle class always believed that their prosperity would only increase but all that is about to change and it has something to do with global development economists Branko Milanovic has examined the consequences of globalization and number crunched large amounts of data on it his conclusion people's income has risen but not uniformly when we look at globalization and we are when we say about globalization we are really talking about the period of the last 25 to 30 years and we have two large groups of people who you can say are the winners of globalization the first group already belonged to the rich 1% of the world and they are getting richer and richer a particular interest are the middle classes in Asia especially in India and China where the income of 2 billion people has grown strongly they are the winners of globalization unlike the lower middle classes of the US and the industrialized countries of Europe income is also stagnating in Germany the group that you can say are losers although they have not really lost in real terms but certainly they have not gained very much from globalization are people from the lower parts of the income distributions in the rich countries so it's actually lower middle class of Germany United States Japan or France and they have incomes today that they had like 20 years ago bahama ski shafts we've managed to pull 2 billion people in India and China out of poverty house this is an incredibly positive development hopefully she pulls it right at the same time it's true that the lower middle classes whether in Mannheim or Michigan haven't got a lot out of it in the last 20 years new personas feel a perfect tightness in Spanish our second clip Marcy in concrete terms it means that if Europe fails to link globalization with principles of social justice there is a long-term risk of a rupture between globalization and the lower strata of the population Angelica's papa back in Munich Thomas Klaus knows now for sure that his plant is slated for closure if the management gets its way parts of the business will probably also be relocated to areas where production is a lot cheaper you got the sin off no matter how long this situation lasts there will come a time when I won't be working a kilometer away from our apartment when I won't have the income and security I have now and then I'll have to take a look at what I'll be able to afford I'll also be back on the job market and that won't be easy I'm well aware of that and there will be considerable upheavals for example this from you choose the family budget will no longer cover the flat we have now you the housing market in Leipzig is very competitive as in all German metropolitan regions people are moving to the city centre here real estate investors smell high returns rents have risen by 25% in the last five years the Ford of all three to four room apartments are rare if they have to move thomas classes family would probably have to relocate to the cheaper edge of town that makes them what price Construction done here is in the luxury segment it's like everywhere isn't it you know the situation in the big cities and I think we're on exactly the same sort of spiral here truly of course that would be attractive but given our current situation I need to give that much thought Christoph una is also building rental apartments here he says they are affordable to rooms for 700 euros excluding services that's 12 euros a square metre it's not the most expensive it's not the classiest but it says something it has style quality meaning of soul I'm very proud of it because I'd like to live here myself we want to become the VW of real estate so we need to step on the gas kalenna success also impresses his children they get asked about him at school in Milan Gandhi classic Omaha classmates say things like guna is that the one from the cg group and you drive up in front of the playground and they're watching and then Google CG group and say do you know what your father does suddenly my son comes home and says daddy is this what you do that's the kind of thing that gives you a little bit of pleasure all of a sudden he's interested and it's a mixture of Pride respect and a bit of sadness because I also know that the time I spent here is sometimes at the expense of the family opinion munch munch last indefinite [Music] anayia corner works in the basement of the old Berlin postal bank building which crona's company is currently renovating she doesn't want to just live off her husband her furnishing company fits out apartments including ones built by her husband the cleaners want to shield their children from their luxurious lifestyle as much as they can [Applause] this thing vomits oh that's why we decided to send them to boarding school there among their peers there and they don't get what's going on at home every day life is nice they don't have to see the events we go to how we go out or what we look like when we dress up for a ball or something can buy it what is chic man in tonight gift is hard to be good at boarding school there are rules and all the children are treated the same here in Berlin not all the children are the same there are children who have rich parents or poor parents fuchsbau Noland and there's a lot of tension among the children about what they have that the others don't Anthony hat I picked up my middle daughter from confirmation class and suddenly she hid in the front foot well my first ictus when I asked her what she was doing she said the other children can't see me sitting in this car those are the problems they have to deal with this and then do a local problem it didn't have good Museum at Clackamas Kapila z20 on movies haha there are a lot of situations where they have it easier but there are also situations where they have to compromise because they have used their a lot it's important to Thomas and Katherine Klaus that they and their children can stay exactly where they are there's a very good social environment here there aren't the typical rogues here where you think does that child even have a chance at all the home the parental and social environment all exert a strong influence and I get to see my friends from kindergarten back in school I'm not the same boy his friends will go to the same school as him and he knows where it is he's already thinking about who will be in his class we have to do everything to keep it this way the more uncertain the future the more important the children's opportunities become when the middle class is fear for their jobs they also fear relegation at Stanford University the downward trend has already been confirmed by figures economists Raj Chetty has evaluated how income has changed over generations he describes a trend that is discernible not only in the US but also in Germany 92% of children born in 1940 earn more than their parents did but then if you look at how that's evolved over time you see a pattern that has come to be known as the fading American dream where that steadily Falls over time such that if you look at kids who are turning 30 today kids born in the middle of the 1980s only 50% of them are earning more than their parents did and particularly they're going to likely to be the losers of globalization if they don't have high levels of education because one of the benefits of a higher level of education it makes individuals more flexible more able to move from one job to another because education is maybe not the only means but it's certainly the primary means by which people can improve their own lot in life and pursue those goals that they have [Music] the promise that the next generation will be better off has always been part of the German identity the modest Central European variant of the American dream but if that promise is broken it has consequences parents will try to maximize their own children's opportunities in life the struggle for status begins with the choice of elementary school [Music] Marcus Costel is a nurse at a hospital in Borkum he has a five-year-old son Luis who he doesn't want on camera Luis will be going to school in autumn Castel is afraid that his son will not receive proper support at a public school so he has registered him at a private school a Waldorf School at the moment he is so far ahead that he can already read and write and so on but the public schools would probably concentrate on the worst in the class first the downtime he'd have in school was a decisive factor for me as well as the different social environment she would be in Causton himself went to a public school run down buildings and big classes with a teacher standing at the front he wants to spare his son that but it doesn't come cheap there's a monthly contribution deducted as a percentage of your salary the highest contribution is five hundred and fifty euros a month and then there's a building fee that's three thousand two hundred euros for the entire school duration and then there are the costs for lunch and supervision multiple times cost which is energy between systems the shite district in boham more than one in five inhabitants here have a migration background and vodka site is home to most of the city's unemployed people right in the middle of it is the Veda Shula Marcos Castel has registered his son here it's a Waldorf School which are private alternative schools like most schools religious or secular they are largely financed with tax money because all children can go here at least in theory kirsten frikar is a teacher there she guides interested parents through the campus here's a classic you're doing great I'll come back again at the end of the year and see how they've turned out there is one teacher here for every ten children there are only 34 pupils in each year in the neighboring public school there are twice as many most of the time the children are divided into two classes that's great Bayla now you can start with the file reduce Mimi and mocha this is of course the attraction for all the students a real highlight the idea is to give our city kids an experience of what nature is and where does our breakfast egg come from not from the supermarket there's a school garden a school circus a theatre stage a sculptors workshop a canteen and music claps his instruments are important for their early musical education you want everyone to experience the success of creating sound [Music] I'm talking the proportion of migrant children children with a migrant background is relatively low here's that's something we don't like at all but it's obviously because they think it's a private school we can't afford it we have two groups who come here one is a big Turkish family it's like a clan that's branched out more and more and so we get the cousins of the cousins who have already been here it's like that I'm very cozy in the cuisine the cuisine man it's all about word-of-mouth I do the second our children here with an African parent these are the two migratory backgrounds that we have children from here although there are only two or three children for class not more not yet two randomly selected school classes one from a Waldorf School in Hana in purple t-shirts and one from a comprehensive school in Cologne skulk district in white the question to everyone do you speak another language at home other than German and do you sometimes help your parents to translate into German [Applause] on segregation is just getting worse the woody tied up both the total number of private schools and the number of private elementary schools have gone up a lot recently in fact the number of private students has increased by 30 percent in the last 20 years the increase has been especially noticeable in elementary schools here the number of private schools has quadrupled that's because you have parents willing to pay for it and do nothing to counter it also there are schools that need these high school fees or think they need them to provide a good education and most importantly we have an administration that neither has the situation under control nor wants to control it on average the state covers two-thirds of the costs of private schools most of the rest is paid by the parents this is how the public school administration saves money researchers estimate it could be as much as 2.4 billion euros a year since these private schools are replacing public schools the state has to ensure they're affordable Germany's Basic Law states that private alternative schools may only exist if everyone can afford them ahoy ticker stranded niche minimum cos it's the current state of affairs is not compatible with the basic law and the main problem here is that the German states which should be monitoring the basic law do next to nothing to put a stop to these discrepancies these Waldorf schools as well as other independently sponsored schools boast that they are good schools and many of them are they have an educational principle that's successful so why don't they take it over into the public school system that's what I'm wondering what this team does is the poverty seek media by start the state is supposed to ensure that good opportunities for children to not depend on their parents money because that often doesn't happen others take on part of the responsibility such as the patrons of the laughing hearts Foundation charity gala in Berlin where Christoph Cunha is also the evenings host [Music] I slept for four hours but I have enough energy for 10 days there's a lot at stake today we have to collect money for the children were really motivated but few children in care have been invited instead the rich and glamorous the Berlin senator for health care and equality is here it's nice to see all you beautiful people and you're doing something good thank you so much for that Dilek coal at is called the patroness here she doesn't have a say in what happens with the donation money but at least she has Lerner on her side they're both committed to saving children from going down dangerous paths in life the girls end up on the street that's how far it goes it tears my heart apart that cannot happen be a girl uka known from a children's talent show sings for the crowds [Music] [Applause] it's an event supported by the taxpayer yes Agustina vav- donations are tax-deductible so in the end the state pays half and we pay the other half and I have to sign the [Music] I have to do a little Heidi Klum here from Germany's Next Topmodel girl we have to do something with your outfits because you sang about a present we would like to make you a present for tonight an evening dress [Applause] I absolutely don't think we should be orienting ourselves around the slower and weaker members of society what I am quite sure of is that will be judged by how we the strong performers deal with the fact that there are lower performers and people who struggle in society like children or people who have fallen into poverty that's how we'll be judged what does someone who can afford anything do who doesn't want more money but more influence does wealth also help in political participation possibly even more than is good for democracy the Siemens employees in Leipzig are making photo greetings cards for their managers they'll see that their decisions affect people right now we feel powerless meanwhile Christoph Cunha is still fighting to stay globally competitive and for that dear investors I'll also need your support in the future so who really has the power they have the power

Channel: DW Documentary

Views: 1,208,114

Rating: 4.8203425 out of 5

Keywords: Documentary, inequality, charity, child poverty, Joseph Stiglitz, Christoph Gröner, Germany, DW Documentary, Documentary 2018, rich people, donations, raj Chetty, deutsche welle documentary, dw

Id: cYP_wMJsgyg

Length: 42min 25sec (2545 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 12 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/happygloaming]

Saw that and feel sorry for his children. He clearly knows he's a shit parent. Have to say that with,UK going, France tettering and Some of the recent info regarding German inequality, envirionmental issues, and the banks as well... the EU is looking pretty shabby even compared to how it was a few years ago.

[u/indiangaming]

Christoph Gröner is one of the richest people in Germany. The son of two teachers, he has worked his way to the top. He believes that many children in Germany grow up without a fair chance and wants to step in. But can this really ease inequality?

Christoph Gröner does everything he can to drum up donations and convince the wealthy auction guests to raise their bids. The more the luxury watch for sale fetches, the more money there will be to pay for a new football field, or some extra tutoring, at a children's home. Christoph Gröner is one of the richest people in Germany - his company is now worth one billion euros, he tells us. For seven months, he let our cameras follow him - into board meetings, onto construction sites, through his daily life, and in his charity work. He knows that someone like him is an absolute exception in Germany. His parents were both teachers, and he still worked his way to the top. He believes that many children in Germany grow up without a fair chance. "What we see here is total failure across the board,” he says. "It starts with parents who just don’t get it and can’t do anything right. And then there’s an education policy that has opened the gates wide to the chaos we are experiencing today." Chistoph Gröner wants to step in where state institutions have failed. But can that really ease inequality? In Germany, getting ahead depends more on where you come from than in most other industrialized countries, and social mobility is normally quite restricted. Those on top stay on top. The same goes for those at the bottom. A new study shows that Germany’s rich and poor both increasingly stay amongst themselves, without ever intermingling with other social strata. Even the middle class is buckling under the mounting pressure of an unsecure future. "Land of Inequality" searches for answers as to why. We talk to families, an underpaid nurse, as well as leading researchers and analysts such as economic Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz, sociologist Jutta Allmendinger or the economist Raj Chetty, who conducted a Stanford investigation into how the middle class is now arming itself to improve their children’s outlooks.