Map: US States Renamed as Countries with Similar GDPs
thesoundingline.com
thesoundingline.com
> "California has a labor force of 19.3 million compared to the labor force in the UK of 33.8 million (World Bank data here). Amazingly, it required a labor force 75% larger (and 14.5 million more people) in the UK to produce the same economic output last year as California! ... Further, California as a separate country would have been the 5th largest economy in the world last year, ahead of the UK ($2.62 trillion), India ($2.61 trillion) and France ($2.58 trillion)."
Migration, or internal migration is probably a better term here.
It isn't just the migration either - it is the nature of what happens. The top cities/areas for several industries are here, and many secondary ones as well. Film production, software/web, lots of aerospace. It also helps that a fair bit basic needs are provided back to the state by itself (Central Valley farming).
Would be interesting to know where the wealth comes from in Colorado, Nebraska and Minnesota. I don't know enough about them to comment.
Edit: some data here: https://www.ocregister.com/2018/01/31/california-migration-c...
"The top relocation motivation for 65 percent of households arriving by van said they came to California for jobs. Only 43 percent of those departing by moving van described the move was work-related.
The jobs rush means your new neighbors are likely wealthier than the people they replaced. United’s study showed 68 percent of arriving households make $100,000 or more annually; just 63 percent of those departing by moving van make above that threshold."
Wealth in Colorado, Minnesota, etc., comes from the same place as anywhere else. The U.S. is a rich country with lots of productive industries. Tech is actually a pretty small portion of that (5-6% of GDP, 3% of employment). E.g. Target is based in Minnesota, and has double the revenues of Facebook.
How much of the GDP is based on coastline, major ports, access to imports from China/Southeast Asia that get distributed to the rest of the US, US based companies located there with manufacturing based in China and even Mexico.
Geographically, it seems like it's in an ideal location to hold business HQ's with access to less expensive labor for imported goods.
Is there a study like this out there?
You compare that to the UK that doesn't have any clearly accessible inexpensive labor force option and it makes you wonder.
Despite this, it's one of the major agricultural producers in the world due to it's variety of climate zones and long growing seasons. I'm not sure of the current status, but agriculture used to be a larger industry for the state than tech and film combined.
One might think that its geographic location would be a problem, and cross-Pacific trade isn't as big as cross-Atlantic, but it's just so large and populated as a state, and it turns out that intra-Americas trade is far dominant to either oceanic competitor. Just selling its products and services to the U.S. alone brings it enormous economic activity. But it turns out that most of what it produces also has ample foreign markets as well (tech, film, food).
Huh? Newport Beach is the busiest port in the world. Cross-Pacific trade dwarfs cross-Atlantic trade.
I also overstated the domain. I should have confined the claim to the country, not the world. And as others have pointed out, even at a national level, the claim is disputable.
Huh? Newport Beach? If you mean the Port of Los Angeles, which is next to Long Beach, but is actually in San Pedro, you're not even close. It's not even the busiest in America.
Measured by tonnage: Busiest port in the world is Ningbo-Zhoushan, China. Busiest American port is South Louisiana (#14 worldwide).[0]
Measured by containers: Busiest port in the world is Shanghai, China. Busiest American port is Los Angeles (#17 worldwide).[1]
Measured by transshipments: Busiest port in the world is Singapore. Busiest American port is Los Angeles (#17 worldwide).[2]
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_ports_by_cargo...
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port...
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_transshipment_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California#Agricult...
Federal land by state table (numbers vary between years and by counting method - Utah federal lands have increased significantly since 2004): https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state#Fede...
California map: https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/printable/images/pdf/fed...
Look at it the other way, the UK can house & feed more people with the same economic output, therefore being more efficient at those tasks.
I have no idea which way it is, but spinning lower GDP per worker as more efficient doesn’t make any sense to me.
Well, the GDP doesn't make any sense either. Busywork also increases the GDP.
During college in Utah I was sad each winter to regularly read stories in the newspaper about homeless people found frozen to death in parks.
After President Jimmy Carter closed the mental institutions in the 70s, the mentally ill people were just let out of the asylums without any plan or further support from the state.
Since then, homelessness has grown into a ubiquitous and rampant problem throughout the United States.
Especially true in sunny California, and doubly so in San Francisco. SF seems to have become the Homeless Capital of the world. A sad and embarrassing state of affairs for a "leading" first world country.
To be clear, the amount homelessness in California is not due to lack of improvement efforts. The City of San Francisco alone pours a quarter of a billion dollars annually into services for the homeless. Despite such efforts, more than half of the homeless in the city remain unsheltered.
"1980 President Jimmy Carter signs the Mental Health Systems Act to improve on Kennedy’s dream [JFK wanted to create a network of community mental health centers where mentally ill people could live in the community while receiving care.].
1981 President Reagan repeals Carter’s legislation with the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. This pushes the responsibility of mentally ill patients back to the states. The legislation creates block grants for the states, but federal spending on mental illness declines."
https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-menta...
As far as California, specifically the bay area: it's a hell of a mess. Beyond people living on the streets, there is a growing group of people living in RVs. I took these pics near my office in Palo Alto a couple of weeks ago:
Illegally parked, but not homeless
Also: at least in Mountain View and Palo Alto, these are not all necessarily illegally parked. They need to be moved every couple of days, but at the moment, the cities aren't pressing the issue.
An American that drives relatively few miles over their life changes their life expectancy to be one of the highest in the world. It is a high impact lifestyle choice that I made a decision to adopt many years ago in part for this very reason.
For instance, New Zealand has the highest number of homeless people per capita. But this is only because in New Zealand, you're basically counted as homeless if you don't have a rental contract or own a house. I was technically homeless for 18 months or so, despite having a roof over my head and being perfectly happy with my living situation, I certainly didn't consider myself homeless until I read an article telling me I was. I still didn't consider myself homeless after reading the article.
Unless we know how the numbers for the UK and California are calculated, there's no point in trying to compare the numbers. Where did you source your numbers from?
I did a bit of research, and while on the face value, the numbers are correct, they aren't really correct at all. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
The official number of homeless in the UK is 307,000 [1]. This includes "sleeping rough, or accommodated in temporary housing, bed and breakfast rooms, or hostels". There are only about 4,800 rough sleepers in the UK [2].
In California, there are 113,000 homeless people (2017), of which 88,000 are unsheltered, i.e. sleeping rough. [3, page 25]. HUD defines homeless differently to the UK Govt too, living in a motel or a hotel (if not paid for by the government) is not considered homeless [4]. So there's a whole category of people counted as homeless in the UK, but not the USA.
There are massively more rough sleepers in California than in the UK, even counting for the fact that the UK is much colder than CA.
Anyway, my rather long winded point is that it's difficult to compare numbers between countries, because countries have different ways of counting things.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/08/one-in-every...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
[3] https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2017-AHAR-P...
[4] https://www.nhchc.org/faq/official-definition-homelessness/
Of course, child poverty itself is no joke..
New Jersey is approximately the same area and population as Israel.
The joke in the anecdote is that the two regions' neighbors have similar attitudes about them.
I also like this world map, scaled by population instead of land area. I think it would be interesting to edit it with major cities, and also use it as a base for other infographics.
http://www.buzzhunt.co.uk/wp-content/2014/01/World-map-sizes...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/africa-subsi...
Honestly, injustice is just too great to bear. All you ever discuss is things like 10% gender-gap in payouts for the people within your arbitrary borders, yet the horrible exploitation inflicted on us by yourself is never ever discussed.
Or, see: China's several trillion dollar trade surplus with the US over the last 20 years.
25% of Vietnam's entire economy is currently made up of US imports from their nation, and it's almost all trade deficit for the US. Their economy is being constructed by US capital and US consumers, enabling them to dramatically lift their standard of living, exactly as China has.
Then we get to the free technology transfer, which enabled countries like China to rapidly leap forward without having to invent much of anything new. They get to focus on implementing things that are already known to work. The US invented nearly all the modern tech infrastructure, the list is hilariously long, here's the short version:
Internet, transistor, router, microprocessor, computer graphics, fiber optics, ram, most operating system tech, Unix, computer networking, the mobile phone, the smart phone, the hard drive, SSDs, the LCD, the LED, the laser, tcp/ip, hypertext, C/C++/Java/JavaScript/Basic/etc., the digital camera, qwerty keyboard, cable modem, the spreadsheet, the relational database, the fax machine, the GPU, 3D graphics cards, ethernet, hypertext, the mouse, streaming media, email, GPS, ecommerce.
Then we can go further back in time to all the older industrial technology invented by the US and Western Europe, which developing nations have been able to free ride over the last 50+ years.
And that's before we get to vaccines, medtech, biotech, pharma, genetech, aerospace, vast free research & data, process knowledge, and on and on.
Oh the exploitation, make it stop.
> The economy of alleged US nemesis Russia is less than 9% as large as the US economy and hasn’t grown consistently in years.
"The economy of alleged US nemesis Russia is less than 9% as large as the US economy and hasn’t grown consistently in years."
Outside from the major metro areas, Russia does not have a extensive - or expensive service economy, and it has very few exports. Between that, and the petro-ruble suffering from oil shocks/sanctions, its GDP is, unsurprisingly, quite low.
[1] Oil is, for example, 3% of Canada's GDP, but you wouldn't think it, given how hard the federal government is trying to prop it up, at the expense of other industries. Extracting it, like growing food, is an incredibly low-value industry.
I'm guessing the majority of that is the millions of people on GSA payroll sitting in office buildings all day. That and of course lawyers and lobbyists.
Updated to 2017 figures and rounded (for the US figures):
It doesn’t mean GDP per capita isn’t interesting either, but they’re different lenses used to view different things.
Russia can huff and puff all it wants, but Ed Snowden is still basically the only prominent American who has ever moved to Russia. This while millions of people from the FSU moved to the US, Israel, Europe, Australia and Canada over the past thirty years, which is the fundamental difference between the US and Russia, etc.
Now if only there was a way to send the people who want redistribution to places where they have that sort of thing. That would be great! But guess what: Norway doesn’t want these people :(. They have enough people jockeying for the dole.
Also, I am not saying the U.S. is a horrible place to live in, I am just saying that it has the potential to be more liveable for all citizens, not just the very "best".
What now?
I focus on immigration because where you choose to live seems like the single greatest vote of confidence that you can make. So I wonder why people here in the states want to make the states more like other places when clearly people from other places want to come here.
> I am just saying that it has the potential to be more liveable for all citizens, not just the very "best".
Yeah it definitely could and should be. There is a lot of low hanging fruit.
You can't discuss either of those two things without also recognizing the other half of those policies: the massive xenophobia, racism, and outright genocide that motivated and fueled them, all under FDR's watch.
There are only two stereotypical places I can think of it being "squandered". The first is the military which, who knows, could be NPV if you consider what the world could be like without it. Ultimately its unknowable. The second is the money not taxed. Which is a particularly frustrating mindset that I encounter on the internet.
In either case, we're not "squandering" money anywhere. You may disagree with the allocation of some resources but that doesn't mean its been squandered.
...haha what was I thinking never mind. Also what does net present value have to do with any of this?
Hah! I didn't say you couldn't have an opinion on it. Only that you can't know the world that "could have been".
> Also what does net present value have to do with any of this?
Squander is a word which means to waste. If a government project has a net economic (or public health) benefit then by definition the money was not squandered.
Just want to point out that this statement doesn't account for opportunity cost. if it could go to something of greater net benefit, the difference between the two could be considered squandered.
I imagine it'd be a lot more like the conflicts in the rest of Africa.
> It's not "unknowable";
Yes it is, unless you have a time machine.
> we just have to start voting...
Ah see, but we already do that. The US votes to keep a massive, mighty military.
Voting just isn't all it's cracked up to be!
> America is mighty but that doesn't translate into the life quality of its citizens at all.
Countries can vary in development and quality of life but your original statement is demonstrably false.
It would be helpful for you to explain how life in, say, Sweden is vastly better than life in Georgia. Before you cite poor uneducated Georgian hillbillies, keep in mind that Georgia is home to Georgia Tech, not to mention Atlanta, which was quite prosperous last time I checked. And if you're going to cite Sweden's "free" universities, you might as well go ahead and throw in a side-by-side comparison of Georgian/U.S. Federal and Swedish tax rates as well.
The US does have an awful lot of support for people, but our society is also hostile to poor people and we have awful workplace regulation for low quality jobs.
You've said nothing. Every country has economic strata. Pointing it out only in the case of the U.S. is specious.
The US is a rich country and the lack of resources for people at the bottom is more likely to be arbitrary than it is to be contributing to that wealth.
How many people are hustling two or more jobs to make ends meet in the US? How many of them afford day care? What happens if they break a leg and can't work for a month?
So, your argument is basically, "Yay, we're better than two theocratic monarchies whose prosperity is based solely on oil wealth and importing a bunch of virtual slaves from poor countries, maybe better than one technocratic dictatorship, better than a bunch of undeveloped third world countries, but worse than every other single Western democracy. Go us!"
I like how you casually discard the vast swath of data that doesn't agree with you.
It is not an accomplishment for the US to be doing better than a bunch of third world countries that are poor as shit because they were on the losing end of colonialism. It needs to be compared to the other comparably developed countries.
I never said it was an accomplishment, just that the U.S. is better than many countries. That was in response to a comment that was implying that the United States is somehow worse than the majority of countries period, not just developed Western nations.
You shifted the conversation by arbitrarily declaring that the U.S. should only be compared to a select group of developed countries, which is not the point that I was originally arguing against.
But let's go with that for a minute. I assume you're measuring stratification by the Gini coefficient, since you don't say. In that case, what you failed to mention is that the list of countries "less stratified" than the United States also includes Syria, Sudan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among many other decidedly unpleasant places. Your implication that some other countries are necessarily "doing it right" compared to the United States because they have a lower Gini coefficient assumes that a lower Gini coefficient is always necessarily a good thing, which is obviously false when you consider all of the data. A lower Gini coefficient does not equal a higher quality of life.
The Scandinavian model relies on many incompatible tenets that could be mentioned, including but not limited to immigration. The Swedish system is already practically collapsing from its first major influx of immigrants ever.
If we want a country in which everyone is welcome, it can't be a country in which we offer a fantastic quality of life automatically through living there. I mean, not until we have some post-scarcity economy, at least.
Another issue is that maybe part of the States' success is related to having more income to yourself, to spend at your discretion after taxes, rather than it being spent for you by the government. It inspires a lot of immigration from people with big ideas, and that could easily change if the U.S. surpasses other countries in taxes.
I think there are models the U.S. should adopt from Scandinavia, however they're smaller in scope and address efficiency with tax money. One example is that all your income tax goes to the local government up until a certain point (~65,000 USD?), and it's redistributed at that level, rather than being siphoned through so many levels of bureaucracy like in the States. It's funny, while being the polar opposite of the U.S. and its conservative values, Sweden still manages a smaller federal government!
A lot of the differences between Sweden and the US comes down to things like whether health care should be a human right etc. Do you think people are less inclined to want "free" health care if they live in a community that's ethnically mixed? I don't buy it.
Australia still manages to have great quality of life (unless you are an Aboriginal). I'm not sure how they manage it, I haven't looked into it, but somehow they have.
Their housing market value as a share of GDP, is about 2.6x that of the US rate.
https://i.imgur.com/h0BOtzE.png
The other thing has been the rise of China and selling them a vast supply of commodities.
In 2002, Australia's GDP per capita was $20,000, while the US was $38,000. A dramatic gap. China's GDP explosion began in 2003 (their economy went from $1.4t in 2002 to $4.6t in 2008, and on upward from there). Australia's GDP soared right along with China's economy.
A very intriguing idea. I like it on the surface, but it falls down a little bit because local taxation is varied. Some cities have their own income taxes, while others don't. Some states have income taxes, while others don't. Some states|counties|cities have sales tax, while others don't. It's a hodge-podge.
The local jurisdictions use this as an incentive to draw in new businesses. The idea is for local control of taxation. But your proposal seems to give the locals more control over taxes than the top-down structure we have now. It's worth thinking about.
It's currently infeasible in the US due to how substantial our federal government is, but it's funny as it's a libertarian dream to minimize the government; Sweden's success is in fact doing so, but also keeping tax rates high in the process.
We are nowhere close to collapsing, first of all. I don't know if you've been back recently or if you get your information from social media only, but really things are fine.
Secondly this was hardly the first major influx of immigrants ever. We saw a major influx during the conflicts in former Yugoslavia during the 90s, lots of people came here after the US started wars against Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 00s. And back in the 60s there was a huge amount of workforce immigration, so much so that Finnish people are still the largest non-Swedish group in the country.
Fun fact: the second largest group of people to come to Sweden in 2016 were repatriating swedes.
And obviously single examples are not representative of the whole, but they're far more useful than GP's blanket assertion which is based on nothing other than, I suspect, the fact that it's currently edgy/fashionable to whinge about all the "free" things Europeans get that Americans don't.
Impecable logic, technically not even wrong, but ... you are saying the wars didn't cause colataral damage to a significant degree because ... you cannot live without air conditioning?
GP was implying that Iraq would be nice if it weren't for American interventions. You appear to be making the same point, given your reference to collateral damage.
I'm saying that's highly unlikely considering that Iraq has always been quite poor compared to the U.S., even before any of these wars.
I see this whiny argument repeated over and over ad nauseam--"Iraq would be an oasis of civilization if only it weren't for those mean imperialist Americans coming in and breaking our toys". Utter nonsense. Iraq was a mess long before the Americans showed up.
But that's all beside the point anyway. This discussion is about relative GDPs of various countries and U.S. states, not an analysis of whose fault it is that the ones at the bottom are at the bottom.
Are you capable of staying on topic? Do you actually have an argument? Or are you just going to fling childish insults in lieu of one?
What-if historical arguments are always fluffy, but we have examples of similar sorts of states experiencing similar initial growth that weren't crushed by an empire's geopolitical interests. Where are they today?
Edit: In any case, the point I was going to make is that the reason why it is the way you observed is because the economies in Oklahoma and Iraq serve different purposes within the context of global capital, Iraq being a client state to the United States and primarily serving as a vehicle of resource extraction and exploitation, while in Oklahoma at least some of that economic activity is going towards the well-being of the people there.
Now, the upshot is that the relative wealth of normal schmoes in the United States and other nations of similar economic development shows the discrepancy that it does because of the same sort of forces in a less extreme way. Americans are more exploited per capita by the capitalist class than they are in, say, the EU. Other people in these threads have described how, e.g. deregulated healthcare is a manifestation of that exploitation.
But to be honest, after your reply I wanted to yank your chain :^)
Ah, the 1970's--the decade that ended with Iraq opportunistically invading Iran and promptly getting its ass kicked. If you want to make the case that America's imperialism is the reason for Iraq's troubles, that's probably not the example you want to go with.
Calling Iraq and Oklahoma similar closes that door, because those two are not similar at all per capita.
I choose to interpret GP's comment to mean what it actually says. You may choose to put words in GP's mouth so that their argument says what you wish it to say, but for me that's a waste of time. If they wish to clarify and restate their argument, they are welcome to do so. But then they will have to provide some evidence that per-capita GDP "goes farther" in other countries than in the U.S. So far nobody has done that.
Well, I do, and I hope this answers your question of why I replied to your post and not the the one above (which did not add much to the discussion to begin with).
If this is an outside looking in scenario, I'll just say that I'm amused and disappointed by international press coverage of the US whenever I travel abroad.
Since the birth of the nation, Russia supported the US. It supported its revolution and supported the Union during the civil war. It even sold Alaska to the US. We brokered the end of the Russo-Japanese war, and about 3.3 million Russian Jews and Poles immigrated to the US by 1917. We then started down the path of trying to support the anti-communists, which of course backfired. We allied with the Soviets during WWII, but then we quickly started the cold war and formed NATO.
Since then, the Soviet Union basically wanted to control eastern (and possibly, eventually, all?) Europe, but it didn't work out, and the nations they had absorbed along the way eventually became independent again. So now their sphere of influence is smaller, but they still have a lot of nukes, and neither of us trust each other.
I would call us "frenemies", perhaps (a bit like China). But we really don't have some big grudge against each other. We're just two dicks who want to rule the world.
Or we can all be happy we learned something today and are a smidgeon smarter than yesterday.
So, about starting the cold war.
USSR meddled in Poland's elections
USSR basically invaded Persia and tried to annex a part there.
USSR tried to force Turkey to gave up control over Bosphor Straits
USSR blockaded Berlin effectively putting people on verge of dying from hunger
... but somebody else started the cold war, absolutely out of the blue?
If you live in a roach infested box in California you need to be putting dollars in the bank and have an exit plan to take those dollars to somewhere with a much lower COL someday, otherwise...you live in a roach infested box with a very high GDP!
Also you sound pretty bitter. I never saw a roach when I lived in Mountain View, though my apartment was pretty small.
At the time of my comment, very early in the submission, all of the other comments were drawing false conclusions about what is being presented. GDP comparisons tell you nothing about the lives of the people living in those two areas being compared. My original comment was meant to point that out to an audience that may not have spent much time studying economics.
If your goal was just to educate people about the shortcomings of GDP as a measure of living standard, the social commentary about California's high cost of living didn't help.