Is it really meaningful to compare one US state with an entire European country? Are you implying it's better to live in Mississippi than "somewhere" in Germany?
I don't personally take it as a recommendation to live in Mississippi, but I do think it's meaningful. For one thing it's a vivid illustration of what anyone with German friends, relatives, co-workers, etc knows... the German economy is in real trouble. In no world should the economic engine of Europe be slipping in ANY metric behind the armpit of the US.
- This is not a recent development; Mississippi had a GDP per capita similar to Germany when the German economy was booming as well.
- Mississippi has a relatively larger petroleum industry; oil always has an outsized influence on GDP per capita, see Qatar.
- As a German, and speaking purely for myself, I don't consider a 0.1% reduction in real GDP to be "real trouble"... certainly not good, but hardly worth losing sleep over.
- What makes Mississippi the "armpit of the US" other than simply being the state with the lowest GDP per capita? Which is not that bad in absolute terms.
Oh, having lived in Mississippi when I was a kid, I can answer that. Mississippi has enormous wealth inequality, so even if its average is on par with Germany, you can find a lot of people living in squalid single wides in the boonies without much access to any kind of services. And that’s white poverty, African Americans in the delta have it worse than that.
They also just have alot of rich people to balance that out. If you live there with a decent income, you might not notice the squalor much at all.
TL;DR: Economic measures are complex and GDP per capita does not at all translate immediately to median/ average household income. Data distribution matters.
