Presume, for a moment, that the numbers provided to the Economist’s table of each country’s output, prices, and jobs are accurate.

If that is the case, the U.S. unemployment rate of 9.5 percent is worse than than the most recent numbers available for many, many countries, including France, Greece, Italy, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Egypt, Israel, Iceland, Lithuania, Peru, Philippines, Ukraine, and Vietnam.

(I’m just picking out the counties that seem surprising. I mean, didn’t the Icelandic economy collapse? Aren’t most of the European countries supposed to be sluggish and held down by heavy regulation, unionized labor forces, and high tax rates? And I figure the Egyptian number has to be unreliable, since my sense when I visited in 2003 was that once you removed those who sit all day in an empty store sipping tea, the employment rate was somewhere around ten percent.)