A friend referred me to an old post at the reliably interesting Strange Maps:
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.... And yet, wile [sic] a per capita GDP might give a good indication of the average wealth of citizens, a ranking of the economies on this map does serve two interesting purposes: it shows the size of US states’ economies relative to each other (California is the biggest, Wyoming the smallest), and it links those sizes with foreign economies (which are therefore also ranked: Mexico’s and Russia’s economies are about equal size, Ireland’s is twice as big as New Zealand’s).
Even though it's three years out of date, this exercise is a good reminder that the U.S. has the largest economy on the globe and is of the necessity of better economic coordination with the states. As this author put it recently, what's the point of extensively coordinating U.S. fiscal policy with France if we don't do the same with California?
-- Tim Fernholz
