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Comment by DorintheFlora | Hacker News Reader

Fifth largest, sixth largest, eighth largest -- it kind of does not matter. A single US state has a larger economy than the vast majority of nations. It's pretty impressive, but it isn't really news. This has been true for a long time. I have seen it said that "California is the American dream squared" or something like that.

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    Populations: France      66M
                 California  38M

It's code for California is doing well, there was a time under Gray Davis when it was falling down the rankings.

Still, it seems thin for HN. Even given that many people here live in California and HN is headquartered in California, it doesn't seem like something interesting, discussion worthy and meriting hitting the front page.

I mean, I like this little tidbit about California and have for years. But this isn't particularly substantive.

Yeah, its definitely Buzzfeed click bait, but there are other interesting indicators of California's growth. For example, California surpassed a number of states in average GDP per capita in the last few years. For example, in 2009 Illinois was ahead of California.

And, yet, here we are, discussing the clickbait -- me included.

(I mean, instead of something meatier.)

> A single US state has a larger economy than the vast majority of nations. It's pretty impressive, but it isn't really news.

California's economy is impressive, but this comparison doesn't really show that. California has a larger population than all but ~15% of the world's nations[0]. Having a GDP larger than 50% of them isn't surprising.

At least 20 US states have a GDP per-capita greater than almost any other country in the world, except for a couple of incredibly tiny countries like Liechtenstein[1], and some countries with massive oil reserves (Qatar, Norway, UAE, etc.). On a per-capita basis, California ranks higher than Switzerland, only tenth in the US.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...

[1] 'per capita' is much less meaningful as a metric when there are several orders of magnitude difference between the denominators, and Liechtenstein has the population of what would be considered a medium-sized town in other countries.

> Having a GDP larger than 50% of them isn't surprising.

Huh? Being the 6th largest economy means it has a GDP larger than 97% of them. Or larger than 75% of the 15% with population larger than it.

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