Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mtanski 3418 days ago
The U.S has ~ 320 million people. So 2 magnitudes difference compared to some others. Additionally the U.S is quite large with many regions and sub-regions. Some regions have quite high GDP while others lower. So given that it's quite impressive versus much smaller and less populous countries.

In any case it's a stretch to make an apples to apples comparison when you have 2 magnitudes of population difference.

1 comments

That way you could say the US is a small country because it only has ~1/4 of the population of China.

Just because a country has a smaller population it doesn't make it unsuitable to live or to compare economic data.

You're just being pedantic here.

There's a big difference between countries that above the US (top 18) on that list where there is a 10x to 100x difference. 1x (US) to 4x (China) does not a magnitude make.

Even given that I would concede that the U.S is a lot less populous country than China. Additionally, there's a lot of places where comparisons of stats are invalid because of that difference.