You'd probably need to have a per-industry dataset to make a robust conclusion. The two countries above the US are Norway and Luxembourg that are probably as high as that because of oil and financial services respectively being a larger part of their economy.

I would like to understand all the nitty-gritty deails behind those numbers.

1. How are work hours measured, do they include overtime, etc.

2. How is "productivity" measured? Eg: if an American company has a factory in China, then are the man-hours in those factories accounted for in a reasonable way, because the profits of those products are probably being counted. Or maybe the measures only calculate the value added by American workers.

Yes it will be value added in the country being measured. But if you get stuff assembled or made to order you are keeping the value added from design etc.

The us is a service economy, while germany is a manufacturing one. It's a bit hard to compare. As for the French with their short work weeks, it makes sense that they're very efficient.

This is incorrect.

The US is the world's second largest manufacturing economy, and just until recently was in front of China.

You can't compare by total output, you need to normalize by population or as percentage of GDP. It's only about 13% of the U.S. GDP and 23% of Germany's GDP according to the World Bank for 2011.

I think you can compare by total output. How about we normalize based on manufacturing output vs population and claim China isn't a manufacturing economy either.

If you have a manufacturing sector roughly the size of the entire economy of France or Russia or Brazil, and that doesn't qualify as having a manufacturing economy, then no country qualifies as such.

Proportions?

Btw. these Lists don't count unemployments.

Also the list could also mean that you guys have more super rich people. Since it's only a measurement per people. So if your rich guys will buy a lot of stuff it will get up really quickly.

Also the numbers are rising in EVERY country even when MORE people getting POOR. So these numbers are just indications that a lot of things go wrong in our world.

15% less than Americans is also what is indicated by http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV.

I would want to know if military, prisons, and the amount we outspend European economies in health care count as productive output.

They do count, if I understand correctly.

In particular, the figure I quoted has been adjusted to try to account for differences in the cost of living in the 2 countries ("purchasing power parity"), but I doubt the adjustment takes into account the fact that Americans spend more for health care while enduring worse health outcomes than Germans do -- or the fact that American spend more on prisoners while enduring higher rates of crime than Germans do.

(I never meant to imply that the US is superior to Germany, just to illuminate one of the limitations of the OP.)

I get it, and I also suspect that financial services is a large factor is US productivity. And even within financial services there is productivity in, say, retail banking and insurance that most people would equate with productivity in any service function on the one hand, and productivity in creating trillions in derivatives where the risk came to bite us in the arse. Was the "productivity" in that adjusted downward when derivatives fueled the financial crisis bomb? As others have suggested, I'd like to see productivity on a per-industry basis.

Isn't that list biased towards countries with more natural resources?

No, the number (if calculated correctly) is unbiased. But it's pretty hard to interpret. It's certainly doesn't measure what people typically understand by the terms productivity or efficiency.