Charles Apple

The United States has, by far, the world’s highest Gross Domestic Product. As one blogger puts it:

US GDP is projected to be $13,22 trillion (or $13.220 billion) in 2007… That’s almost as much as the economies of the next four (Japan, Germany, China, UK) combined.

But how do you make readers understand just how high that number really is?

One way would be to show them how individual states compare to other nations of the world.

That’s the premise of this very, very strange map. The blogger who constructed it — and posted it at the appropriately-named Strange Maps blog — labeled each state with the name of a country whose GDP is roughly the equivalent of that state’s. Click for a larger view:

A fascinating exercise, to be sure. However, even the blogger who presents it points out the flaw in the premise:

…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.

Read more here:
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/06/10/131-us-states-renamed-for-countries-with-similar-gdps/

Intrigued? Bookmark the StrangeMaps blog here:
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Charles Apple, Graphics, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.