Tuesday Map: Why Alabama is just like Iran

Via the good folks at Freakonomics, here's a very cool map of the United States, with each U.S. state relabeled with the name of a country that supposedly has a similar Gross Domestic Product: 

I'm proud to note that my home state, Pennsylvania, invites no embarrassing comparisons. Some caveats on the data: Russia, with a GDP of $733 billion in 2006, is best compared not to New Jersey, which has a gross state product of about $453 billion, but to Florida at $716 billion. And tiny Washington, DC, at $88 billion, puts out about $10 billion less than the entire country of New Zealand, whose GDP is more comparable to that of Utah. And actually, Iran's annual GDP is nearly $34 billion larger than Alabama's. Still, it's an interesting way to look at the world.

For a more traditional (and more accurate) way of slicing the data, take a look at this color-coded map from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis: