This brilliant map renames each US state with a country generating the same GDP

Sometimes it helps to employ unconventional perspectives when thinking about the size of things.

So here's a pretty awesome map from American Enterprise Institute's Mark Perry that shows how massive and productive America's $16.7 trillion economy really is on a global scale.

The map compares the gross domestic product of each US states with the national GDPs of other nations.

America's largest state economy is California. For 2013, the Golden State's GDP was approximately $2.05 trillion, which roughly the same as Brazil's GDP of $2.25 trillion. But it's notable that Brazil's population is around 200.4 million, while California only has around 38.8 million - meaning that California produces about the same as Brazil with about 80% less people.

And to put it in a global perspective, if California were its own country, it would have been the 10th biggest economy in the world, just behind Russia, which had a GDP of $2.096 trillion that year.

Check out the rest of the states in the map below:

AEI