A sense of perspective...

We forget how flippin' huge our economy is. This map may help.


[click on map for larger image]

By linking GSP (Gross State Product) to GDP (Gross Domestic Product) you can get a sense of how far ahead we are economically, despite all the hype about other countries' growth rates.

The blogger where I found this map had a rather curious comment:

The creator of this map has had the interesting idea to break down that gigantic US GDP into the GDPs of individual states, and compare those to other countries’ GDP. What follows, is this slightly misleading map – misleading, because the economies both of the US states and of the countries they are compared with are not weighted for their respective populations.

Pakistan, for example, has a GDP that’s slightly higher than Israel’s – but Pakistan has a population of about 170 million, while Israel is only 7 million people strong. The US states those economies are compared with (Arkansas and Oregon, respectively) are much closer to each other in population: 2,7 million and 3,4 million. [More]

The population matters little, IMHO. The size of the economy is the size of the economy. Period.