California Poised to Overtake Germany as World’s No. 4 Economy

It'll be interesting to see what it is like 12-18 months from now, because the headwinds in tech are just starting to roll in full force before these statistics were finalized. California may see a bit of a down round next year.

To your other point, regarding headquarters not being a good measure. I think the tech employee driven inflation of housing prices in the Bay area and surrounding metros (sometimes as far out as Sacramento. For non natives, that's ~2 hours away by drive, usually a more consistent 1 hr 30 minutes by train in my experience. Some corporate buses even go out to these farther out metros to pick up employees) is strong evidence that they're still hiring pretty locally, though with remote work in stronger force than ever, it is changing a bit, but those effects are yet to be determined in the common case, but it will upend some of this, 100%

EDIT: I 100% agree about dysfunction in San Fransisco proper. Its a thing.

Lived in SF for 9 years (2012-2020), and visited many places in the whole bay area. I don't know what you're talking about, really.

Bullet train? Slower than the slowest train in Italy.

Homeless people? Try Mountain View, try San Jose. Only Marin County is a bit spared by it.

Dirty? Expensive? Pretty much everywhere. Few exceptions, like downtown Palo Alto, around the Apple store.

Really, you can't say it is "not that bad", unless you're forgetting there's the rest of the (civilized) world to compare it to.

That’s arguably ending and dwindling down.

I hope people in Texas and Florida, maybe the Georgia, Colorado and Carolina make a stiff competition with California. It’s good for CA and good for United States.

Where is economic growth in europe happening despite degrading social indicators? Are there really countries with significantly degrading social indicators & economic success over the last 20 years in europe? All countries I know some social indicators of are actually improving. Maybe inequality....I think that was increasing

So... Every single company?

I have no idea what it is that you are comparing or where you pulled those numbers from. The systems are not the same and we have a lot more than "universities" for higher education, such as Fachhochschulen and Hochschulen.

Overall, statistics says the number is 55% for the share of youth starting higher education in Germany: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/72005/umfrage...

We also have what "Facharbeiter" for most non-higher education professions, which take 2-3.5 years. https://www.bmbf.de/bmbf/en/education/the-german-vocational-...

There is some discussion that there are now too many in the higher education track and too few in the vocational training track. We have too few "Facharbeiter" and "Meister" for a lot of important professions for the practical work.

Personally, having done both tracks - in 1992 I obtained what would now probably be called "mechatronics engineer" after three years of training in a school and a huge chemical fiber plant for the practical on.the-job parts. Afterwards I studied CS and half of business administration. I think almost two thirds of youth every year going to higher education is way too much. Again, we have this vocational training, if there was nothing and Bachelor degrees count both as higher education and are used in place of where Germany uses our vocational training system - again, 2 to 3.5 years! - than it makes sense to get at least a Bachelor. But here in Germany I think we actually could use shifting some of those 55% into the other track.

If you get such a vocational training degree, e.g. "Facharbeiter", you are already pretty well educated and qualified. If you add a "Meister" on top of that after getting some work experience you are on a path to really good earnings and don't have to hide at all from comparisons with top engineering degree holders. Those people would not show up at all in your comparison, because you don't have that system.

I do agree that it's a very lazy form of news generation. Most of the (publicly) richest people tend to hold most of their wealth in stocks, which have always had volatile prices. So "the rich got richer/poorer" is largely synonymous with stock prices went up/down.

Exchange rates tend to be a bit less volatile, but they do fluctuate quite a bit, so that accounts for quite a bit of the changing fortunes of California vs Germany. Still, it's quite remarkable (if true) that California has similar nominal production/income as Germany which has twice the population, implying that the people are on average twice as productive.