> Mississippi's GDP per capita being similar to that of France, Italy or Spain
And that's why GDP per capita is so useless.
You have a few multi billionaires running your country, and you have tens of millions of people in abject poverty, tens of millions with no health insurance, etc.
Don't look at GDP per capita, it tells you noting about life for the average person.
Mississippi's median household income is $36,919. This compares to the UK's median household income of $31,617.
Note, of course, that this doesn't count social benefits. The UK's household income is lower, but they also get the NHS, better unemployment insurance, and so on.
These are gross income values (pre-tax), so, actually they do count social benefits (at least partially, the median household may be the beneficiary of transfers).
"abject poverty" means something like "the worst poverty you can think of". For the US, that probably means some portion of the ~1.6 million homeless (not all of them though), not the tens of millions of people that are below the national poverty line.
We do have about 25 million people with no health insurance.
And that's why GDP per capita is so useless.
You have a few multi billionaires running your country, and you have tens of millions of people in abject poverty, tens of millions with no health insurance, etc.
Don't look at GDP per capita, it tells you noting about life for the average person.