Well, the per-capita GDP of the poorest U.S. state — Mississippi — is greater than that of the U.K., France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Poland and many others, and within 10% of Finland, Germany, Belgium and Austria. 34 of the 47 European states have lower per-capita GDPs than Mississippi.
The median per-capita U.S. state GDP is $78,649; the median per-capita European state GDP is $28,713.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...
We have to ask ourselves what we want. Because it's not GDP, you can't eat GDP or sleep under it, you can't even withdraw it from the bank. So more directly, how does it influence our life? (Of course GDP influences our life to some extent.)
It is generally understood that GDP is a poor measure of what matters to people. The OP should know this.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/quality-of-life-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/quality-of-...
I mean you can eat GDP and sleep under it. That's what it measures production.
Estimated GDP in 2024 28.9 T vs 2025 of 13.3 T
That’s a huge gain in 20 years. Where is the commensurate equivalent growth in housing, education, healthcare, cheap food, etc…
There is a huge disconnect between GDP increase and the economic pressure the majority of Americans feel.
Looks like that should be 13 T 2005?
The richest man in the world in 2008 was Warren Buffett with a net worth of 62 billion dollars. Now with 62 billion you are not even in the top 20. So the growth went into wealth inequality.
Take pretty much any quality of life thing. Just as one example
Mississippi: The average home size 2,065 square feet
United Kingdom: The average home size is 818 square feet
No, you cannot "eat GDP", but its a useful proxy as it correlates very highly to a lot of things we do care about
You also have to ask yourself why so many europeans try to move to the US for a better life (especially talented ones) and why almost no american does it the other way around. (The number is ridiculously low in comparison)
People move east to west across the pond, because they want the life offered by the US economy.
>The number is ridiculously low in comparison
Where are you getting your confidence that that is so?
> You also have to ask yourself why so many europeans try to move to the US for a better life
I can guarantee you that number is now not growing so much.
And is the average Mississippian better off than the average citizen of UK, France, Italy, etc..?
How is GDP per-capita related to the customers having any rights?
Some people think deregulation equals productivity equals prosperity.
Sure, America has the most school shootings and medical bankruptcies. But they also have the biggest houses, the biggest cars and the most private swimming pools per capita.
> Poland
I don't know much about others, but perhaps you should be comparing ratio of GDP in the last 20 years, not absolute values. With Poland coming very poor out of communism and all.
Mississippi is the chronic showcase of american wealth inequality.
Mississippi has the lowest life expectancy in the U.S. (about 73 years), significantly lower than the national average (77).
Mississippi has the lowest median household income in the U.S. (about $52,000 in 2022), compared to a U.S. median of around $75,000.
Mississippi has high rates of obesity, diabetes, and preventable diseases, partly due to poor healthcare access.
France and Italy have top-tier universal healthcare, while the UK's NHS, despite challenges, still provides free-at-point-of-use care.
In Mississippi, many rely on Medicaid or have limited healthcare options.
Mississippi’s school system ranks among the worst in the U.S. European countries have stronger public education systems and more government support for higher education.
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>> France and Italy have top-tier universal healthcare
>According to what parameters? For what it's worth both seem to rank lower than the US according to the OECD.[2]
That would be surprising, since the US doesn't have universal health care.
> According to what parameters?
That it’s actually usable? Great healthcare is pointless if you cannot afford to go to the doctor.
> 88% of the adult population (age over 18) in Missisipi has attained at least a High School degree. [3]
Sure, but what standard of high school degree?
> That it’s actually usable? Great healthcare is pointless if you cannot afford to go to the doctor.
And yet Americans seem to survive more often with a healthcare they supposedly do not use than Italians and Frenchmen with a healthcare they use.
> Sure, but what standard of high school degree?
Surely you aren't implying that the standards of an American HS degree are so low that the education that that huge percentage of the population with a middle school degree or lower is receiving is comparable to it?
GDP is a trash measure of what life is actually like. It should go away.
Strictly looking at GDP is a terrible way to compare economic conditions between US states and countries.
GDP of Mississippi looks great only because of a strong dollar. It doesn’t really account for living conditions.
How do US state GDP per-capitas compare to the GDP per-capita of Ireland? And if this comparison is not meaningful or relevant, what does that say about the choice of metric you made?
It means that GDP doesn't buy prosperity.
We've been told for decades that letting our economy turn out like Europe's was something to fear, while they outpaced us in virtually all quality of life measures.
We can no longer claim being the richest country in the world as a source of uniqueness or justification -- handed to us by the gods. I think this is part of the reason for the present descent into authoritarianism.
I'm sure the GDP evenly distributes amongst the population right? It's not like the US has massive wealth disparity or anything that could massively affect the implications of a simple per capita GDP comparison.
And that GDP is one guy.. if you take him out of the state though, it gets dark pretty fast.. people dont vote for a return of monarchy if things are going well.
Mississippi has much higher rates of infant mortality, poverty, preventable deaths, and lower overall education levels than most of the EU. Economic output fails to capture the degree to which the economy serves its people.
While average GDP sounds like it’s something that everyone participates in, in reality, under capitalism wealth and income follow a Pareto distribution. As a result, GDP per capita tells us more about total output than about how it is actually distributed among the population, who is benefiting, and thus the well being of the society as a whole.
> under capitalism wealth and income follow a Pareto distribution.
And under the other forms of government thus far tried?
Anyway, Capitalism doesn't explain wealth inequality. The ability to accumulate capital and apply it to industry with limited liability doesn't inherently cause wealth inequality. That's the fault of Greedism, Over-inflated-sense-of-selfism, and Giving Money to Politicians is like giving Whiskey and Car Keys to Teenage Boys-ism.
We're over taxed and over regulated, that's nothing to do with Capitalism.
Capitalism isn’t a form of government. It’s an economic system. Politicized, sure.
Wealth inequality isn’t simply a side effect of capitalism—it’s structurally necessary thanks to the division of society into two classes, capitalists and workers.
I do agree that a capitalist economic system isn’t alone in manifesting inequality. I would further acknowledge that under capitalism the amount of wealth inequality differs from one capitalist society to the other. Yet the present levels of inequality we see around us are nearly unprecedented.
You blame greed. But capitalism enshrines the profit motive. It incentivizes capitalists to maximize profit regardless of the effect on the working class even if that means bribing politicians or whatever. Greed is a central feature of capitalism, not some personal failing to be explained at the individual level.
Meanwhile, neoliberal deregulation has been enacted for the last 45 years. What are the effects of this? Real working-class wages have remained stagnant while the wealth gap has drastically increased. Should we believe the answer is more deregulation?
Under a deregulation ideology, the wealthy push for deregulation when it suits them on the one hand while benefiting from and expanding government influence on the other (subsidies, bailouts, regulatory capture, etc.). That’s why after 45 years of a deregulatory ideology operating at the highest levels of our governments, subsidies and regulatory capture still exist.
Consider the present moment. Elon Musk slashes government spending while receiving millions from the federal government. This is not a bug. It’s a central feature of this ideology.
We may have different members of the upper class at the wheel now, but they are still using the same siren’s call of deregulation to justify their policies, ostentatiously reducing government influence in some areas while tactically expanding it in others - not just handouts to Trump’s cronies but also expansion of executive powers and erosion of civil liberties.
GDP per capita of Ireland is double that of the UK? Is that because of the tax dodge thing? When did that happen?
Maternal death rate in Mississippi, 36 per 100k
https://mississippitoday.org/2023/01/26/maternal-mortality-rate-worsens/ https://mississippitoday.org/2023/01/26/maternal-mortality-r...
In Greece , 8 per 100k
https://genderdata.worldbank.org/en/economies/greece https://genderdata.worldbank.org/en/economies/greece
That's just a random health stat, but it's clear the Greek have a far healthier population.
But Mississippi has more millionaires so I guess it's fine.
Great, it's 8.3 in Albania. Doesn't really help you if you're a typical person making less than 10k a year
I have to imagine you cherry-picked maternal death rate (which is anomalously high in the US for reasons that even experts in maternal death cannot explain) in bad faith because the all-cause mortality rate in the US is 1,044 per 100k compared to 1,412 per 100k in Greece - 35% higher[0].
I guess it's not so clear.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/death-rate-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/death-rat...
Life expectancy in Mississippi is 10 years shorter than in Greece
>Mississippi ranked dead last in a CDC ranking of all 50 states and the District of Columbia when looking at 2021 data. The magnolia state had a 70.9-year life expectancy rate, slightly lower than West Virginia's 71.
https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2024/12/29/cdc-data-mississippi-worst-us-life-expectancy-why-where-people-live-longest/77264058007/ https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2024/12/29/cdc-data...
>The current life expectancy for Greece in 2025 is 83.10 years, a 0.18% increase from 2024.
The life expectancy for Greece in 2024 was 82.95 years, a 0.18% increase from 2023.
The life expectancy for Greece in 2023 was 82.80 years, a 0.2% increase from 2022.
The life expectancy for Greece in 2022 was 82.64 years, a 0.2% increase from 2021.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/grc/greece/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/grc/gre...
Greece has a older population.
Plus we're talking about Mississippi not the entire US.
Yeah, but have you been to Mississippi?
you would not be making this comparison if you've spent time in mississippi
Per capita GDP is a bad measure when so much of it is captured by the 1%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Thanks for being a great example of what this person wrote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43385268#43387809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43385268#43387809
I’d wager that the median European is happier and healthier than the median Mississippian.
Mississippi is perhaps a poor example to use, as its wealth is highly concentrated, as well as segregated along racial lines. It houses some very affluent communities and also some with open sewers or no public utilities at all, and a state house entirely unconcerned about reconciling the two because it's been gerrymandered to hell in order to prevent the ethnic group that makes up nearly 40% of its population from having anywhere near commensurate representation.
Ok. Now compare Mississippi to those places on wealth inequality, life expectancy, education, health care, social mobility, etc...
Beyond what everybody else has said, I wonder how much of that difference is due to the healthcare in Mississippi being counted as part of GDP instead of as a state service? Ever ballooning healthcare costs are the cancer that is eating the developed world alive.
And who cares about that? GDP is not a good indicator about people’s quality of life. Maybe of the top 0.1%.
A significantly better metric to compare would be median hourly wage (ideally, purchasing power adjusted, but that's hard).
The US average is actually behind wealthier European nations there (Ireland, Scandinavia, Benelux, Switzerland, Germany): 20$/h compared to ~20€/h. Purchasing power adjustments would also probably favor Europe I guess.
So the much stronger US GDP/capita output apparently does very little for the average citizen...
This was honestly surprising to me, I actually expected the US to be comfortably ahead in this (specifically significantly ahead of Germany). France is also much weaker than I expected in this (~17€/h) not including it was cherry-picking on my part, Eastern Europe is super poor (Bulgaria under 5€/hour!), and the top contenders were unsurprising, except maybe how well Denmark did (~30€/h).
Sources: eurostat + statista (because couldn't find what I wanted on bls.gov)
> Purchasing power adjustments would also probably favor Europe I guess.
I doubt it. Germany and especially Switzerland have a quite hight cost of living. Coming from Canada, I get sticker shock every time I go to the US because of how cheap everything is. I had the opposite reaction going to Europe (except for Italy).
It would also be interesting to compare take-home (after tax) pay.
You are 100% right about Switzerland (but its so far ahead that adjustments would not matter too much), for the others its probably barely double digit percentage adjustments.
My personal experience is that German supermarkets are priced extremely competitive (Lidl/Aldi specifically), and Italy felt more expensive by comparison to me (except maybe for local produce and cheese).
Comparing after-tax pay instead would help the US pull ahead for sure, but I feel a bit mixed about that because those taxes pay for stuff like child- and healthcare, which in the US is probably significantly more expensive out-of-pocket than the median EU citizens pays in taxes for the same.
Notwithstanding the other comments about the effect GDP per capita might or might not have on individuals, how much of this GDP difference is driven by the strength or weakness of consumer protections within a given economy?
Is higher GDP per capita truly a strong argument against consumer protections?
The fact that Mississipi and Bavaria Germany have the same GDP per capita tells you a lot about GDP.