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 $18 trillion economy is on a global scale.

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

America's largest state economy is California. In 2015, the Golden State's GDP was about $2.46 trillion, slightly above France's GDP ($2.42 trillion). But France's population is about 66.48 million, while California's is only about 39.14 million — meaning California produces about the same as France with about 40% fewer people.

To put it in a global perspective, if California were its own country in 2013, it would have been the sixth-biggest economy in the world — right behind the UK, whose GDP was $2.85 trillion.