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Slash Podcasts.

Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

We're the programme which dances daringly with the data that surround us in the news and in life,

and I'm Tim Harford.

The journalist Fraser Nelson caused quite a stir recently.

When he wrote an article for the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph,

in which he said that if Britain would leave the European Union and become the 51st state of America,

the country would actually be, if you took economic output adjusted for living costs,

the second poorest state in the Union.

Only Mississippi would be poorer.

This comment was met with both skepticism and annoyance by many proud Brits online,

but was Fraser Nelson right?

Chris Dillow writes for the investor's chronicle and has a blog called Stumbling and Mumbling.

He's been checking the numbers.

I started by asking him why so many people question Fraser Nelson's assertion.

You mentioned the Southern states to the typical Englishman.

He pictures deliverance and men playing banjos,

and he's got all these images of quite a poor country.

But in fact that's a very outdated image,

and the Southern states have grown very strongly over the last 40-50 years.

...