List of GDP Stats

In class I showed a bunch of these. There are more. I'm not concerned about you knowing all this stuff. It's just lists of facts after all. The bigger point is that you should know that these things exist and you can go find them if necessary.

Here's what I showed you in class:

• List of U.S. states ranked by GDP (you should know the big four, and the areas of the country where the poorer states tend to be located).
• List of U.S. metropolitan areas ranked by GDP (you should know the big three, and be able to name a bunch of the top 10 or 15.
• List of U.S. counties ranked by GDP (you should know that this exists, that New York county, New York City, and New York state are not similar at all, and maybe the names of a few prominent counties around the country. For example Harris County was in the news about mail in voting quite a bit back in October, but it would be natural for someone to say "who the heck cares about some county down in Texas", but it would be missing why that county is important. It's also important because of the counties that are very big economically, but really don't have a major city in them, like Orange County, and Fairfax County).
• List of world metropolitan areas by GDP (you should know the big ones, but also the surprises on the list: that Tokyo is huge, that Seoul is one of the biggest, or that Istanbul would be near the top of the list).
  
• List of provinces in China by GDP (you should know the big ones, like Guangdong, Shandong, Jiangsu, because these things are as populous as big western European countries, and some are approaching their level of GDP. You should also know that the U.S. has one city that isn't in a state but is comparable in its own right — the Washington metropolitan area is our 6th biggest and sprawls past the limits of D.C., while China has designated three this way: Shanghai, Beijing, and Chongqing).
• List of NUTS-1 regions in Europe by GDP. The EU is trying to get rid of the old subdivisions within member countries, which were of different sizes and often had more relevance historically than they do today, with a new system called by its acronym NUTS (there's maps here). NUTS-1 are the biggest ones, these are divided into NUTS-2 sub-regions, and those further divided into NUTS-3 sub-sub-divisions. By the time you retire, people may talk about something like Northwest Italy or East Sweden or South Spain as naturally as Americans talk about North and South Carolina. It's also plausible that some of the NUTS preserved historical features. For example, is the NUTS-1 containing Paris really the richest one in Europe, or did the French convince everyone else that their main one should include more territory than others, while the English didn't bother to add stuff on to Greater London? You should know the big ones around the continent: this is where the action is.

When I write that you should "know" this stuff, that does not mean I'm going to check if you have them memorized for an exam. It does mean you should know where to find this information, and be curious about the details. 

For example, you might note that Wuhan is on the list of biggest metropolitan areas, not far below Miami and Madrid and above Sydney: Wuhan was not a household word 13 months ago, but perhaps people would have paid more attention to COVID-19 if they knew how big Wuhan actually was on the world stage. Wuhan was really the first place in the world to ever be locked down (on January 23, 2020); can you imagine our reaction if Miami had been locked down? 

It was also a big thing when COVID-19 had its first sustained outbreak in Europe, in northern Italy in late February (a map towards the bottom of this post shows that it didn't land in a poor area, or slowly spread from the outside, but rather landed in one of the richest areas of Europe, and quickly clobbered it). Perhaps we would have paid more attention if people knew that the Northwest Italy NUTS that was hit initially has a GDP larger than the entire San Francisco Bay area.

Also, everything in this class coverage was about size of GDP. But we're also concerned about GDP per capita, and there's a wealth of lists of that too.