The whole American economy, in one visualization

Conventional maps, by their nature, emphasize sheer spaciousness even though many large areas can be relatively devoid of human beings or other forms of activity. This cool diagram from HowMuch.net gives us a different way to visualize the entire US economy, depicting the whole thing as a big circle and then slicing it up by state, with each state’s area representing its share of total economic output:

The basic news that California and Texas are really big shouldn’t come as a huge shock. But you also see that Florida punches a bit below its weight in terms of population, in part because a large share of the state’s residents are retired.

There are also disparities related to wealth. New Jersey has fewer people than North Carolina, Michigan, or Georgia, but it contributes more to the national economy since the productivity per worker in New Jersey is much higher.