Hello, hello, welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host, Andrew Hitton.

And I will refrain from ever doing that again.

I am so sorry.

My apologies, I just can't pull off a Welsh accent, hard as I try.

Anyway, maybe a year or two ago, I started encountering weird stats and think pieces comparing the economies

of the European Union and the United States.

Headlines like this from Euro News.

Porest U.S. state rivals Germany, GDP per capita in U.S. and Europe.

The piece has a good graph where it shows how the per capita

GDP of Europe and the United States stack up, as well as various states and countries therein.

For example, Alabama, Arkansas, and West Virginia have a higher per capita GDP than Austria, Sweden,

and Germany. And Mississippi, the poorest state in our union, out per capita GDP than Austria, Sweden, and Germany.

And Mississippi, the poorest state in our Union, outperforms the UK, France, Spain, and Italy,

and was in the striking distance of Germany, as noted in the headline.

There are other articles in which you take any European country besides Luxembourg and Ireland, pretend that they joined the Union as the 51st state, and you'd find that they would also be the 51st state in terms of

GDP. By that metric, at least, the poorest U.S. state. And these pieces inevitably get pushback.

The weakest pushback goes something like this.

Hey, you didn't fiddle with the stats correctly.

If you take into account the proper econometrics, France wouldn't be the 51st state.

It'd be number 47.

So there.

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