George Canning was a 19th-century British prime minister whose chief claim to ignominy was to have the briefest tenure of that office at 119 days (an untimely death cut his term short). That was until Liz Truss beat his record in 2022 (incompetence cut hers even shorter). Canning was also a wit, who said (possibly apocryphally), “I can prove anything by statistics except the truth.” At The Economist, quantitative folk that we are, we would strongly disagree. But his quip came to mind when I was reading our ranking of the world’s richest countries. For there is no simple way to work out which place is wealthiest.

Measures such as GDP are distorted by population size, while income per person fails to account for differences in prices between countries. For a more accurate picture we judge countries by three measures. America, which has the biggest GDP at market exchange rates, falls to sixth, ninth or even tenth, behind tiddlers Luxembourg and Switzerland, when you use other gauges. Explore our interactive ranking to see where your country places, but keep in mind another aphorism: size isn’t everything.