In discussions of California politics or its economy, frequently someone tosses out a statement about California being effectively a seriously-sized country in its own right. Undoubtedly true stuff. Shows up repeatedly in articles like https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/07/american-state-bigger-economy-than-india/.
Those statements always feel, to me, like implicit comparisons to other US states. So, simple slice-and-dice of very basic facts about the states using 2017 numbers so one can make explicit comparisons:
$ ipython --no-banner
In [1]: %run data.py
In [2]: # Biggest states by square miles
In [3]: area.sort_values(by='Area').tail(5)
Out[3]:
Area
State
New Mexico 121590
Montana 147040
California 163695
Texas 268596
Alaska 665384
In [4]: # Biggest states by population
In [5]: population.sort_values(by='Population').tail(5)
Out[5]:
Population
State
Pennsylvania 12805537
New York 19849399
Florida 20984400
Texas 28304596
California 39536653
In [6]: # What's California look like vs the Tri State?
In [7]: analyze(['CA'], ['CT', 'NY', 'NJ'])
Out[7]:
State GDP Population Area GDP per capita GDP per area
0 California 2746873 39536653 163695 0.0694766 16.7804
0 ConnecticutNew JerseyNew York 2399686 32443227 68821 0.0739657 34.8685
In [8]: # Throwing in Pennsylvania to bring up the population?
In [9]: analyze(['CA'], ['CT', 'NY', 'NJ'], ['CT', 'NY', 'NJ', 'PA'])
Out[9]:
State GDP Population Area GDP per capita GDP per area
0 California 2746873 39536653 163695 0.0694766 16.7804
0 ConnecticutNew JerseyNew York 2399686 32443227 68821 0.0739657 34.8685
0 ConnecticutNew JerseyNew YorkPennsylvania 3151757 45248764 114875 0.069654 27.4364
Pennsylvania could be replaced with Massachusetts/Rhode Island. Or you could include states heading down towards Washington. Or you could start drawing random samples of states constrained to be +/- X million people then see if California somehow looks like an outlier. Etc.
Anyhow, to conclude, California's a big economy. But it's not (at least superficially) outsized relative to other parts of the United States that contain similar populations.