[quonn]

> and it [...] is increasingly lagging behind the US

Nothing new, that was also the case in the 90s. It's actually surprisingly robust. It does not create Fortune 500 companies, because it instead creates a very large number of medium size businesses (a few hundred or a few thousand employees only) that specialise and often become global market leaders. Because there are many different ones that model is robust and the work is labour intensive and creates both white collar and blue collar jobs.

So not just bad. And let's not forget that it's a small country. The US has 4x the population, even Japan has 50% more. To say nothing of China, India, etc. Yet Germany is still #4 in terms of GDP.

[t8sr]

AFAIK the strength of German SMBs is often overstated. When you look at what's been driving economic growth, it's mostly been creating new, large companies like Google and Amazon. Germany used to be good at doing that: SAP, VW, many others. But not for the past 20-30 years. Why? Because establishing a new large enterprise is most readily done by inventing a new sector of the industry. But Germany's (and Europe's) regulation regime, risk aversion and slow processes prevent that from happening. Maybe Google couldn't have been German, but Deepmind could have been.

But it's hard creating something new, when new technologies are banned by default and you are required to file tons of paperwork before doing anything. And it's also hard when the type of people who form startups are not moving to Germany, because they can start a company in the UK or Israel with 20 pounds by filling out an online form in 5 minutes.

[ahartmetz]

Since you mention DeepMind, DeepL is German (Cologne). It is the best translator for the languages it supports. Source: I have a sister who is a professional translator. She uses it to get a rough version and then polishes it up as needed. No other tool produces a rough version that is good enough to save time.

The DeepL founder is, from his name, probably Polish.

[q-big]

> because they can start a company in the UK or Israel with 20 pounds by filling out an online form in 5 minutes.

Starting a company in Germany is much easier if you don't need limited liability (which GmbH and UG (haftungsbeschränkt) do offer).

[kaashif]

> So not just bad. And let's not forget that it's a small country. The US has 4x the population, even Japan has 50% more. To say nothing of China, India, etc. Yet Germany is still #4 in terms of GDP.

This can be corrected for by looking at GDP per capita, where the US is at $75,180 and Germany $48,398. Perhaps 2022 is a special situation due to the dollar surge and Ukraine war, but in 2021 the picture was different, but still not great: Germany $51,238, US $69,227.

My point isn't that GDP is everything (it's not), but if you say "the US has 4x the population", you should at least attempt to correct for that and look at per capita numbers.

[quonn]

I looked at global ranking based on GDP.

[ChuckNorris89]

> Yet Germany is still #4 in terms of GDP.

And Nokia was the #1 phone maker in the world in 2009, and Japan was the second largest economy in 1988 and predicted to overtake the US, and what did that mean today?

Current leaderboard position is not a guarantee for future success. GDP isn't everything to measure future success, and Germany could very well sink much lower in a decade or two along with most of Europe.