philipines = oklahoma

So says Map 131 from Strange Maps. The map renames the US states with the names of countries with the same GDP.

Yes, Oklahoma. (It's the state shaped like a cleaver, right above Texas.) Home of infamous global-climate-change-denier, Sen. James Mountain Inhofe. (How backward is that? And he's been in office since 1994!)

Of course, as Strange Maps rightly points out, the GDP equivalents don't account for populations:

The creator of this map has had the interesting idea to break down that gigantic US GDP into the GDPs of individual states, and compare those to other countries’ GDP. What follows, is this slightly misleading map – misleading, because the economies both of the US states and of the countries they are compared with are not weighted for their respective populations.

Pakistan, for example, has a GDP that’s slightly higher than Israel’s – but Pakistan has a population of about 170 million, while Israel is only 7 million people strong. The US states those economies are compared with (Arkansas and Oregon, respectively) are much closer to each other in population: 2,7 million and 3,4 million.

And yet, wile a per capita GDP might give a good indication of the average wealth of citizens, a ranking of the economies on this map does serve two interesting purposes: it shows the size of US states’ economies relative to each other (California is the biggest, Wyoming the smallest), and it links those sizes with foreign economies (which are therefore also ranked: Mexico’s and Russia’s economies are about equal size, Ireland’s is twice as big as New Zealand’s).

So, here's the tale of the tape:

	Oklahoma	Philippines
Area	181,196 km²	298,170 km²
Population	3,450,654	88,706,300
Density	30.5/km²	276 /km²
Largest MSA	Oklahoma City	Metro Manila
Pop. of largest MSA	1,225,084	11,289,368
GDP Per Capita	$ 34,286	$5,000 (PPP)

The original map, i think, is from Carl Stormer's blog ("Carl Talk"), and came to Strange Maps via The Big Picture.

Strange Maps is currently one of my favorite blogs. It pleases my map geek heart.