Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> Is that something we require from companies?

In Germany, yes. For mass layoffs, this absolutely has to be considered. In general, the older the employee is, or if the employee has dependents, the more difficult it gets to both fire them or lay them off.

View on HN

Germany's GDP is shrinking.

The regulations that make it hard to lay off someone have an equal and opposite effect of making companies very reluctant to hire. This impedes the efficient allocation of labor, resulting in a poorer GDP.

It looks like Germany's GDP has increased every year in recent memory except 2009 and 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany#Data

google [german gdb growth] says: "-0.2% annual change (2024)"

The "GDP Growth (Real)" column in the wikipedia article GP linked agrees, but it doesn't tell a story that justifies "Germany's GDP is shrinking".

See the graph "G7 Real GDP % change compared to pre-Pandemic level":

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn02...

The US has 13.3% growth and Germany 0.1%.

Because of AI and it's indirect effects, such as electricity demand.

Two points:

1) GDP is, while very important, not the only measure of country's prosperity

And

2) how much of those 13.3% is being hoarded by a single-digit amount of companies?

> hoarded

Productive companies do not hoard wealth. They invest it. GDP is not a measure of wealth, it is a measure of production.

Softbank -> OpenAI -> Oracle -> Nvidia -> Intel -> Microsoft.

Over 1 trillion dollar invested in total. Where is the production?

I (and most of the people I know) are happily paying for ChatGPT (or one of its competitors) every month. The value I get from it dwarfs the tiny fee.

I'm a paying subscriber to both ChatGPT and Grok and am a satisfied customer. It's fun to compare the output of both.

> They invest it.

Where? Where is the growth in other sectors then?

> The US has 13.3% growth

Without the incestous web of the AI bubble, the US would actually be in a recession, especially due to the tariffs.

Yes, if you overlook the productive companies, the economy is unproductive.

I would 100% chose to live in Germany than the USA. GDP is one consideration, but QOL more important.

Live wherever you want to!

That’s an odd response. My point was GDP alone is a poor way to measure a country.

It's a measure of the economy.

Or a measure of quality of life. But it sounds like you’re only interested in pro-American talking points.

It's nearly impossible to measure quality of life, because everybody has a different idea of what that means.

You mean like the human development index and various other measurement techniques?

Which is more important to your quality of life - central heating, or indoor plumbing?

Germany has all three. I’m not sure what your point is.

I asked which was more important - i.e. what's your weighting of these?

It is irrelevant, if both are available as base package.

I guess you want to point out that choices are subjective.

That subjectivity is relevant within their classes (air—food-water, security-health-plumbing-heating, smartphone-car-vacation, yaht-designerBrands) Definitely there will be one person who choses to die, just to get latest smartphone, but most people will not.

These classes get less clear/useful as you go up, but most people will agree on the basics.

Tangent: it is important for me personally for my neighbour to have the basics (and more), as that increases my basics like security, sanitary conditions.

GDP is an objective metric, while quality of life is subjective and is inevitably based on arbitrary weightings by the people trying to calculate it.

GDP PPP per capita is better measure of quality of life.

it's not. An economy where only a select few benefit from the GDP (e.g. via stocks - the richest 10% of Americans own 93% of the stocks!) is not a "quality of life" measure at all.

[1] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market...

You can select yourself as a beneficiary by buying stocks. With Robinhood, you can do so with less than a C-note.

> the richest 10% of Americans own 93% of the stocks

Most prolly got that way by buying stocks!

It's not a good one though, because weird effects like the AI bubble incest investment web artificially blow up the GDP, and because it doesn't reflect the economy "feeling" the population experiences.

To expand on the latter point - say you have automation enabling more economic growth. A significant amount of people lose their jobs, others are afraid they'll be the next ones on the chopping block, and people hold their money together as a result - if you ask general people on the street or in representative surveys, you'll get the feedback that the economy is going to the dogs, but "the numbers" don't reflect that.

Here in Washington state, they are heaping taxes on us in unprecedented amounts. That's not going to help affordability at all.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/washington-states-tax-blitz-497e...

Wouldn't that be awesome?

I enjoyed living in Germany for a while as an Air Force brat.

Good for you.

"The Stupidity of GDP per Capita"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiymTzsZfoA

How much of this years GDP growth in the USA went to average citizens? What does GDP growth matter if your citizens have zero access to healthcare, can't improve their conditions, can't innovate, can't try new ideas because they are tied to healthcare via their current job?

How much of American GDP growth goes to Billionaires and isn't a useful health metric?

See: Billionaires added record $2.2tn in wealth in 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/dec/31/billionaires-ad...

Billionaires become billionaires by making and selling things people want. Obviously, a lot of people want what they are selling, and think it is worth buying.

That's such an excessively naive, childlike take that it's hard to know where to start. You don't become a billionaire by "making and selling things". That doesn't scale beyond the low millions. You become a billionaire by leveraging existing capital to rearrange bits of the economy in such a way that money flows towards you [note]. Productive output, be it goods or services (which you seem to have forgotten exist) is strictly optional. You think Warren Buffet sits in his garage cranking out widgets? What planet are you on?

[note] For example, you might contrive to purchase the entire supply of some valuable resource with inelastic demand, and then sell it back to people, perhaps at an inflated price.

> You don't become a billionaire by "making and selling things".

See Microsoft, Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX, Pixar, Lego, and on and on.

> you might contrive to purchase the entire supply of some valuable resource with inelastic demand, and then sell it back to people, perhaps at an inflated price.

Example?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com