US States by GDP per capita: [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_territories_by_GDP)
Countries by GDP per capita: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita)
In: 322
So there’s three things.
First:
GDP per capita isn’t really the number you should be looking at. That includes a lot of money that doesn’t make it into the hands of your average person and might not even make it into the hands of someone in the state itself in the first place.
What you want to look at is median income. For [Mississippi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_income#States_and_territories_ranked_by_median_household_income)that’s 45k for households. In [France](https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/macroeconomic/median-household-income-in-france-2010—2021-/), that number is 61k
A really extreme example of this is actually Ireland, on paper it;s GDP per capita is $125k but that’s because it acts as a tax haven. This means that a ton of massive global companies are headquartered there and all their revenue counts as GDP in Ireland, but almost all of the money gets sent overseas and your average Irish citizen gets very little out of that deal.
Second:
America has some of the worst social services in the developed world (probably *the* worst) this means that a poor person in the US will have a much, much worse quality of life than an “equally” poor person is basically any other developed country.
Third:
You probably haven’t seen a lot of the really poor rural places in France, you probably think of Paris and basically just Paris. So conceptually we are comparing the best France has to offer to probably the worst Mississippi has to offer. (this is much less important an the other two factors imo, but it’s worth noting)
Latest Answers