Some Canadians clutched their pearls so hard they nearly shattered last week, after The Globe and Mail published a deep dive into how, as its online headline read, “Out of Nowhere, Canada Became Poorer Than Alabama.”
There was some debate about whether analyses showing that our GDP per capita had recently fallen behind Alabama’s is enough to declare us poorer (GDP per capita is a nation’s economic output divided by the population, and is used to determine a country’s standard of living). But the real source of righteous indignation was far more revealing: the idea that Canada’s moral and social standing is so superior that such data can’t possibly reflect reality and, even if it does, it doesn’t matter.
