Thursday, June 17, 2021

A Huge but Tiny Country

Yesterday I learned that the economy of Russia is the same size as the economy of Texas — $1.7 trillion a year. (California's economy, for comparison, is almost twice the size of Russia's, at $3.2 trillion.)

How does Russia's population compare to that of Texas? Well, that's a different story:

Hmm, that Russian economy has to work for almost five times as many people as the one in Texas.

This set of numbers makes all the penis-waving from Vladimir Putin, and the political repression there, make a lot more sense.


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