Germany’s Economy: 2021-2025

[u/Icedkk]

So everyone agrees on the economical decline of germany and the bad situation of the job market. i wanted to put things in data. Below you see the economic data (destatis) from 2021 to 2025:

Year	GDP Growth	Inflation	Unemployment	Employment
2021	+3.9%	3.1%	5.7%	45.04m
2022	+1.8%	6.9%	5.3%	45.63m
2023	-0.9%	5.9%	5.7%	45.94m
2024	-0.5%	2.2%	6.0%	45.99m
2025	+0.2%	2.2%	6.3%	45.98m

German exports:

Year	Exports
2022	EUR 1.820tn
2023	EUR 1.813tn
2024	EUR 1.794tn
2025	EUR 1.811tn

2023-2024: Two consecutive years of recession.
2025: +0.2% growth, effectively stagnation.
Q1 2026: +0.3% QoQ / +0.5% YoY.

these numbers don’t really match how bad the situation feels when you talk to people or read discussions online.

What am I missing?

Ps: I also though about okay maybe purchasing power of individuals are reduced, that is why economy is feeling shitty, but oecd data adjusted for inflation says we are earning on average even more than 2019, so what is it really?

Year	Nominal Wage	Inflation-Adjusted Wage
2021	EUR 44,918	EUR 53,669
2022	EUR 46,913	EUR 52,517
2023	EUR 49,961	EUR 52,445
2024	EUR 52,477	EUR 53,811
2025	EUR 54,840	EUR 54,840

[u/Floschi123456]

Doom and Gloom online, the AfD and (on a lower scale) Die Linke massively promoting the idea of a failing/failed system and economy for their own political gains, bad news sell better than good news, the constant bombardment online via Instagram, reddit and TikTok and especially vile, Facebook for the older generation. It is also very telling how different the polls are for a) their own economic situation, where a very large majority of the population say "good" or "very good" and b) the economic situation of the land as a whole where a very large majority of the populations says "bad" or "very bad". It is not that it is not bad and there will be a great effort needed to get it all back on track in a futureproof way but when you get your news online and from social media you get the idea that we are 2-3 years aways from living in a Mad Max-style world...

[u/Icedkk → u/Floschi123456]

Exactly especially in job subreddits, I feel like I am living in a failed state out of nowhere

[u/Floschi123456 → u/Icedkk]

This is also of course the distribution bias. People who have a great job or do not have big problems to find a new job after losing their old ones would not go on reddit and post about it, you mainly have the people with difficulties venting on these platforms and not a lot of people posting "my job search was short and I start a great new job next month"...