The United States is ridiculously wealthy. Of course, you probably already know that. However, you may not realize just how wealthy most of us really are, especially when compared to people in other parts of the world.
Here are a few quick facts to consider:
- If you make over $34,000, you are among the world’s wealthiest 1 percent.
- There are roughly 100,000 people in the U.S. with net worth exceeding $50 million, while only 25,000 individuals on the entire continent of Europe are that wealthy.
- And we’re only getting richer. Over the last decade, global wealth has shot up 68 percent, with nearly three quarters of the increase taking place in the U.S.
Last week, one Reddit user decided he wanted to visually display how wealthy U.S. states are compared to entire countries in the other parts of the world. His finished product is the map above, which compares the GDP of each American state to a similarly sized economy somewhere else in the world.
The results are stunning.
Other Reddit users pointed out that states like Minnesota with a population of about 5.5. million, Kansas (2.9 million) and Louisiana (4.6 million) have economies roughly the same size of countries like Nigeria (175 million), Bangladesh (154 million) and Pakistan (182.5 million).
In other words, Imagine Minnesota’s economy supporting half the entire population of the United States and that’s basically what you’ve got in Nigeria.
The map doesn’t paint the entire picture, though. As Policy Mic points out, measuring Purchasing Power Parity, which is “essentially an adjusted cost of living measurement,” may have been more useful. And “median household income would be a more telling measure.” But the map still lays out some eye-opening comparisons for most of us Americans who have a hard time looking outside of our little bubble to see how the rest of the world lives.
So how did Alabama stack up? With a Gross State Product of roughly $170 billion, Alabama’s economy is approximately the size of the entire country of New Zealand ($169 billion). Roll Tide, Bill Johnson.
Follow Cliff on Twitter @Cliff_Sims
