You won’t be able to convince your mind, but squares A and B are the exact same shade of gray. Go here for an explanation.

We often lose sight of: a) how big the U.S. economy is, b) how productive American workers, and how much we produce vs. other countries. After all, who can get their mind around $13 trillion, the size of the U.S. economy measured by GDP ($13,000,000,000,000)?

World GDP is about $47 trillion according to the CIA World Factbook, so the U.S. economy produces more than 30% of world output every year, with just 5% of the world’s population. Reason: American workers are so productive compared to workers in other countries. That’s why per capita GDP in the U.S. is $43,500 vs. the world average of $10,000, and why many single U.S. states are equal in size, or larger than, many foreign countries.

The fascinating GDP map above (click to enlarge) matches the size of state economies in the U.S. to the size of comparable countries. You can view GDP by state here, and GDP by country here.

For example, Texas GDP is about $1 trillion, equal to the entire GDP of Canada. Georgia GDP is $363 billion, approximately equal to the GDP of Switzerland. Mississippi GDP is $81 billion, a little bit smaller than the GDP of Chile last year ($95 billion), so the comparisons in the map might be approximate, not exact.

Genesee County (includes Flint, MI) where I live, produces roughly twice as much output annually with a population of 400,000 people as the entire country of Honduras produces with more than 7m people! The state of Michigan produces more output ($376 billion) with 10 million residents than the entire country of Turkey produces with 70 million people!

Thanks to Chapomatic for the pointer on the GDP map.

Do a Google searh of the exact phrase “disappearing middle class” and you’ll get 16,500 hits.

Think about what it would mean statistically or graphically if the middle class of Americans really did disappear. Assume that income is distributed somewhat normally like Distribution 1 above (technically it would actually be skewed to the right to account for the Oprahs, Tigers and Bills, as in Gates). If middle income households really did “disappear” wouldn’t we then have a) nobody left in the middle and b) two new distributions, one of low income households and one of high income households like the distributions above labelled “Low Income” and “High Income?”

Does anybody really seriously think that could ever happen in the U.S.?

We hear a lot of handwringing these days about the “disappearing middle class,” and how the benefits of the current economic expansion are going disproportionately going to “the rich.” How does the middle class of the U.S. compare to countries in Europe?

Long-playing (LP) records are gathering dust in the homes of many music lovers (like me), who hope to hear their contents one day on a CD player or iPod.

Now, an updated version of another audio relic, the phonographic turntable, may provide a fairly inexpensive way to do that. Two new consumer turntables on the market at $200 or less connect directly to computers to transfer cherished vinyl to MP3 files and CDs.

Read more in NY Times.

Federally backed student loans regularly go to the wrong people – in 2003-04, nearly 30% of students from families earning more than $100,000 a year got them – and they make tuition more expensive for everyone. And while federally subsidized loans – on which Democrats are now focusing after promising to cut rates on all federal student loans during the campaign season – go to fewer wealthy families, they still tend to benefit well-off students and those whose parents understand how to game the system.

Read more here.

Meatlifting is a grave problem for food retailers: According to the Food Marketing Institute, meat was the most shoplifted item in America’s grocery stores in 2005. (It barely edged out analgesics and was a few percentage points ahead of razor blades and baby formula.)

Meat’s dubious triumph is due in part to a law enforcement crackdown on methamphetamine use. Meat used to be the shoplifting runner-up to health-and-beauty-care items, a category that includes cough medicines containing pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient in home-cooked meth.

In 2003, for example, a quarter of shoplifted products were HBCs, while meat took second place at 16 percent. But states began passing laws that require stores to move medicines containing pseudoephedrine behind secure counters. That was enough to cut the pinching of HBCs, which fell by 11 percent between 2003 and 2005.

Read more here in Slate.

See Faces of Meth here, you won’t believe it.

1. Ethanol is already one of the most coddled and protected industries in America. Before even pulling into the filling station American taxpayers have already paid between $1.04 and $1.45 in government subsidies for each gallon of ethanol, according to a report from the Global Subsidies Initiative. That adds up to an annual total of about $6 billion. Read more here in today’s NY Sun.

2. Skyrocketing prices for corn on the world market have pushed up the price of the humble tortilla, the mainstay of the Mexican diet, by nearly a third in the past three weeks, to 35 cents a pound in Mexico City and even higher in other parts of the country. Some economists blame the increased demand for corn from ethanol plants in the United States, and it is true corn prices in the States last week reached their highest point in a decade (see graph above). Read more from NY Times article Cost of Corn Soars, Forcing Mexico to Set Price Limits.

“From the point of view of physics, it is a miracle that 7 million New Yorkers are fed each day without any control mechanism other than sheer capitalism.”

~John Holland, scientist, Santa Fe Institute

“I am convinced that if the market system were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aims, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the the human mind.”

~Friedrich Hayek, Nobel economist

“It is something of a miracle that individual selfish decisions (in a market economy) must lead to a collectively efficient outcome.”

~Steven Landsburg in the Armchair Economist