Can you expand on this? Do you mean to say that much of American GDP comes from things like natural resources where American employees have the fortune of working to extract? What other factors besides employee productivity and natural resources would contribute to GDP?
It's a little disingenuous to compare the US and Germany. While there are large variations in Germany too (and one could look at the individual states there as well) -- it would make more sense to compare US states, rather than all of US. Or: one might compare the whole of EU (or possibly, some older subset of EU) with all of the US.
[edit: On the other hand, as the US leads by a pretty significant margin, there must be other factors at work. While Germany isn't top among the EU, the US is top of the world on that list, anyway. I'm a little surprised the US is even ahead of Norway -- given the pretty big GDP boost Norway gets from oil, and our low population.]
The unadjusted GDP for Norway in 2013 dollars is around $100k, and for the US around $53k.
Purchasing power is depressed in Norway compared to the US primarily because salary structure is one of the flattest in the world, which means salaries in service jobs are amongst the highest in the world, and consequently prices are amongst the highest in the world.
Finance is another factor, both the trade (with the two largest stock exchanges based in the US) and having historical wealth and wealthy immigrants investing in the US.
A lot of it is just higher buying power. For example, you can sell SaaS for more in the US than you can in Europe because Americans are simply able/willing to pay more.
High GDP is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in a consumerism oriented economy. If everyone makes more, everyone can make even more, which results in even more spending and then even more money making and ... you get the idea.
Doesn't matter if things cost more in the US - the numbers given are adjusted for purchasing power. They represent the fact that in the US, a given worker produces a larger basket of goods.
Here's another way of boosting the PPP numbers: Distribute salary extremely unevenly, and push large portions of your population into near poverty, and thus drive down the costs of providing essential products and services.
I don't know how the US does in pure productivity, but you can't get productivity rankings from GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity alone.
