There are a bunch of developments that concern me currently.
I’m currently living in Germany, but I plan to move elsewhere in ≈3 years because it feels very likely that either the politics of the CDU manages to copy the AfD and stays in power after the next federal election, or the AfD manages to get the power the CDU currently has. Unfortunately, the entire DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) isn’t looking much better, either.
On the other hand, remember the 2008 financial crisis? It very much looks like it currently gets repeated. But Germany is currently trying its hardest to copy both present-day and 2008 problems (and bad solutions to those) that lead to the particularly bad situation of Greece back then. Or in short, I expect Germany to try its hardest to tank its economy and social security so much that the economy starts to look better in Greece. Obviously, that will degrade the living standards in Germany massively. This imo is a meme by now, because German politicians try to copy so many not-that-good ideas from Greece.
So I’m currently plaaning to move to either the Netherlands (because they’re nearby, and look like they’re paying well), or to Greece (because I’m learning the language anyways, the weather is nice, and soon the economy won’t look much worse than in Germany).
Given that the job market looks bad in most places, if it still looks that bad when I hopefully managed to finish my Master’s degree (hopefully in the next 3 years), I’ll try to do a PhD afterwards. Financing that shouldn’t be worse than trying to find a normal full-time job (depending on location, one has to get a grant instead of a “scientific” job that allows one to do doctoral studies on the job), and it’s better than having a gaping hole in ones curriculum vitae due to lack of jobs.
The main disadvantage to doing a PhD in Germany (besides the political downward spiral) is that most PhD positions for stuff I’m interested in (mathematics) are only part-time (60% or 50%) positions, but often with ≈100% obligations, and funding might either come from some general “pot” or be tied to a (often quite big) project grant. The other annoyance in Germany is that the WissZeitVG complicates stuff, and kinda sets a “timeout” (afaik 6 years) during which stuff has to get finished, otherwise one has to continue unpaid, unless one manages to successfully hunt for additional third-party (afaik project-) funding.
In particular, most critiques of PhDs appear to assume a normally working economy. But what if one can pretty much predict there won’t be ~? As a then-former university student, one would probably also have the disadvantage to get none or almost no “unemployment benefits / compensation” either, unless one managed to get lucky and have impressively large income during university studies.