Indeed. When people make bad comparisons it usually indicates they have no clue what they’re talking about
It’s not a stupid comparison. Just one that requires nuance. There is a valid observation in China and America consistently producing companies that, with tens of thousands of employees, create wealth rivaling that produced by millions of others.
Technically, all of it. Determining the socially-useful component of either production or wealth, on the other hand, is a tough and subjective exercise. (Wwrong answers are all and zero.)
A useful proxy is taxable wealth. So far, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Anthropic share sales have generated tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of taxable proceeds for the United States. Those are figures that would pay for a lot of Germany's pension problems [1].
[1] https://www.ifo.de/en/opinion/2025-10-08/hidden-multi-billio...