"You can pull out these GDP per capita statistics and say that people in Mississippi are vastly wealthier than people in Frankfurt and Hamburg. That can’t be true. Just spend two months in Hamburg and spend two months in Tupelo, Mississippi. There’s something wrong if the statistics are telling you that the people in Tupelo are three times wealthier than the people in Germany."
I stopped reading after this thinking along the same lines as the OP. I'm still not fully awake but this doesn't seem like a good argument, although to be fair you didn't say the arguments were good.
GDP is a terrible measure of a population's wealth.
As a famous economist said - "the ideal GDP is a chain-smoking terminal cancer patient going through an expensive divorce whose car is totalled in a 20-car pileup"
I stopped reading after this thinking along the same lines as the OP. I'm still not fully awake but this doesn't seem like a good argument, although to be fair you didn't say the arguments were good.