13 maps about America worth bringing up at dinner parties and/or first dates

Life is a nonstop barrage of social engagements in which you are forced to conjure up topics to discuss with people of whose interests you are wholly ignorant. We're here to help. Here are 13 surprising and/or cool-seeming maps about America to fill the awkward silences.

1) More than half of America's wealth is in this circle

Alexandr Trubetskoy

Alexandr Trubetskoy

2) … and more than half its GDP is in these tiny orange areas:

Atrubetskoy

Atrubetskoy

3) America's schools are still very segregated

Urban Institute

Urban Institute

4) This is what America would look like if the states were even in population

Neil Freeman

Neil Freeman

5) California is as rich as Italy, with 11 million fewer people

Mark Perry, AEI

6) The West, upper Midwest, and rural South are the happiest places in the United States

Ed Glaeser, Joshua Gottlieb, Oren Ziv

7) Stuff is cheaper in the South and Midwest

(Alan Cole, Lyman Stone, Tom VanAntwerp, Richard Borean / Tax Foundation)

8) America spends eight times more on defense than Russia

International Institute for Strategic Studies / Agence France-Presse

9) The Midwest is three times as big as France

"The Midwest: God's Gift to Planet Earth"

10) Delaware, Maine, North Dakota, and Alaska don't have any billionaires

Movoto

11) Mississippi and North Korea have roughly the same land area

Mainstay 17

Mainstay 17

12) New Orleans has a similar homicide rate to Honduras

Zara Matheson/Martin Prosperity Institute

Zara Matheson / Martin Prosperity Institute

13) The US is the only country to not use the metric system other than Burma and Liberia

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons

If you liked these, be sure to check out 70 maps that explain America and 22 maps and charts that will surprise you.

Correction: This post originally mistakenly said that New Orleans' homicide rate is similar to that of Nicaragua. It's not; as the map shows, it's close to that of Honduras.

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