It's not cherrypicked at all. 1980 is an ideal date to refer to. It's smack in the midst of the cold war, when the US was very clearly a global superpower, and then to relate it to the smaller economic size ratio to other major nations like France.

There are more extreme examples - different years - of comparisons I could have easily used instead, to amplify differences if that's what I wanted to do. I used a decade point for a good reason, in part to avoid being aggressive on cherrypicking.

PPP terms are worthless at best and wildly and entirely inaccurate at worst. They barely even qualify as guesses.

That's how you get Puerto Rico with a PPP GDP per capita equal to New Zealand and just below Japan in 2018 per the IMF (and far above Portugal; absurd). That's embarrassing for anyone that puts stock in PPP as a premise.

Taiwan has a PPP per capita higher than Austria, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, Canada. Yeah, sure.

And Russia almost has a PPP per capita as high as Portugal and just a bit below Israel.

Saudi Arabia has a PPP per capita 20% higher than Finland. Uh, bullshit. Higher than Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Australia, Germany, Canada, France, Britain, etc.

And China has a PPP per capita equal to Iraq & Botswana and below Iran and Gabon.

That's a small example of what makes PPP laughable. It could hardly be any more useless and unscientific.