Two scatters answer it. Total output rises with population, as you'd expect — more people produce more. Output per person does not. Both axes are logarithmic, because population and GDP each span four orders of magnitude.
Correlation is not causation, and the negative sign is not "big countries make people poor." The pattern is driven by which countries sit at the extremes: small, wealthy financial and resource economies (Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, Singapore) at one end, and large, low-income countries (DR Congo, Ethiopia, Afghanistan) at the other.
Ireland's figure is a known artifact. Multinational profit-shifting inflates Irish GDP well beyond domestic activity; Ireland's own statistics office publishes GNI* precisely because GDP overstates it. It leads this chart for accounting reasons, not living standards.
This is 54 countries, not all ~195. The sample skews toward large and well-documented economies, so these coefficients describe this sample — not the world.
| Country | Region | Population (M) | GDP ($B) | GDP per capita |
|---|