It was nine years ago when Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator, first suggested that the U.K. was poorer than any U.S. state but Mississippi. This came as an uncomfortable shock for many in Britain for whom Mississippi, as a byword for backwardness, conjures up clichés about the Deep South. Every time anyone has made the comparison since, there has been an indignant outburst from Britons keen to denounce the data.

In practice, when trying to provide a definitive answer to the Mississippi Question, no uniform, up-to-date set of data exists. But if you take the most recent U.S. figure for Mississippi’s GDP and divide it by the state’s population, you get a pretty accurate figure for GDP per capita in current dollar values. Make the same calculation for the U.K., with total GDP data divided by the population, and you end up with two comparable numbers.

[Be sure to read it all. Carswell nails the issue, which is that the UK has long drifted back to pre-Thatcher socialism and the stagnation it brings, while Mississippi and other US red states have embraced more free-market approaches and entrepreneur-based economic policies. Not only has Mississippi surpassed the UK economically, their lead is increasing. That’s an interesting analysis to read in The Atlantic. — Ed]