
I got a lot of criticism for the post below comparing the amount of durable goods manufactured in the U.S. in November to the entire annual output of goods and services (GDP) in some other countries. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough in my comparison, but I was trying to make the point that we lose sight of the ridiculous size of the U.S. economy ($14,000,000,000,000 of annual output) and one way to put it in perspective is to show that just the manufacturing output (ignoring services and government) in the U.S., in just one month (ignoring the other 11), is about the same amount of output for all goods and services over the entire 12 months in many countries like Singapore, Chile and the Philippines.
Maybe the map above from a CD post in 2007 does a better job of demonstrating how large the $14 trillion U.S. economy is, by matching gross domestic product in 2006 for each of the fifty U.S. states (data here) to comparable GDP of entire countries (data here).