You’re not wrong. Was looking at this for a different reason today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_regions_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita Texas is bolstered by their hill country tech sector, gulf port refineries and west Texas crude. The rest is a lot of prairie land and mountain ranges. What surprises me is that Texas has lower productivity per capita than Alaska (another oil rich, wide open spaces state), and Nebraska, which I can only assume one man is doing some very heavy lifting there. Many of the more large-population liberal states have higher gdp, even with their typically higher taxes.