The following chart is interesting in light of all this talk about how China has ascending to the second largest economy, knocking Japan out of the number two spot. The US is still number one. I thought it would be interesting to see how we in the US rate city-by-city in terms of earning. If I can find a chart that compares personal net earnings country-by-country, I will post that chart in a follow up.

This chart obviously does not include all US cities, since I am pretty sure that Washington, DC, San Francisco, CA, and other cities are doing better than Delhi and Jakarta.

However, we all know that China isn’t a 1st world country and is still a developing economy. We also know that there are still peasants and subsistence farmers — so China is just powerful based on the size of its economy and not the wealth of its people. I wondered.

What people like to bandy around is the per-capita GDP, which is simply, as far as I can tell, the GDP divided by the population, which does not reflect the wealth of the population, just the efficiency of the country… sort of like taking the gross weight of a sports car and dividing it by the peak horsepower of the car, thereby coming up with a power-to-weight ratio.

That’s a great number for a car, since it allows light cars with smaller engines to be able to compete with huge sedans with enormous engines — it sort of flattens the playing field and allows apples and oranges to compete.

However, for people, is it a good number? While I love this city-by-city comparison — as the US only exists in