Headline salary comparisons mislead, and the same is true of headline GDP comparisons.

As I was digging in to this topic some time ago [1] let me try to summarize: from an economic standpoint one way to think about the US-Europe income gap is to separate output per hour from GDP per person. On the Penn World Table's international-prices measure, German hourly productivity grew 109% from 1990 to 2022 versus 70% for the US; on the national-accounts measure which PWT recommends for growth comparisons, it's 61% versus 68%.

GDP/person = GDP/hour x hours/worker x workers/person. French hours per worker fell about 8% while hours per resident stayed flat, because employment rose. German hours per resident fell 7.7%, but its 15-64 share fell from 69.0% to 63.6%, so ageing does part of the work. The IMF finds desired hours fell alongside actual hours, so some of the shorter week is chosen. Some of the gap is nonetheless real output per hour lost to fragmented markets and thin risk capital, not shorter weeks. I went down this rabbit hole and wrote up the numbers and sources here:

[1] https://philippdubach.com/posts/us-europe-productivity-worki...