Texas is about to pass France

France has twice as many people as Texas and two thousand years of head start. Texas is about to catch its entire economy anyway.

Not a metaphor. The numbers: Texas produced $2.9 trillion of output last year and grew around four percent. France produced a bit over $3 trillion and grew less than one. Run those two lines forward and they cross, and not someday. A single American state, one that fits inside France's shadow on population, is about to out-produce one of the great nations of the world.

Now, I want to be fair to France, because the honest version of this story is more interesting than the bumper-sticker version. Texas gets to cheat a little. It doesn't run its own currency or its own army. It doesn't carry a national pension system or a foreign policy. It sits inside the American platform: the dollar, the deepest capital markets on earth, the military umbrella, three hundred and thirty million customers, and the right of any American to load the truck and move there tomorrow without a visa. France carries all of that weight itself. Strip that out and the comparison gets closer.

But here's what the fair version can't explain away: all fifty states sit on that same platform. Only a few of them compound like this.

So the platform isn't the answer. Something else is.

Energy is the floor

I think the answer is energy, and I don't mean that the way a brochure means it. Energy is the floor everything else stands on. Cheap, abundant power is what lets you build the factory, run the smelter, cool the servers, expand the grid, cut the ribbon, and absorb the two hundred thousand new people who showed up looking for work. Which is why every one of those things is happening in Texas right now, all at once.

Europe spent the last twenty years treating energy as a moral question, something to be apologized for and rationed. Texas kept treating it as the foundation you pour before the house goes up. Neither choice looks like much in any single year. Compound them for twenty and you get that chart.

And before anyone thinks this is about French genes or Texas swagger, France itself proved the point in the other direction. After the 1973 oil shock, France decided it would not be held hostage on energy, and it built about fifty nuclear reactors in roughly fifteen years. Fifteen years. To this day, something like two-thirds of French electricity comes from that one burst of nerve.

And they can un-decide, which is mostly what Europe did afterward.

Which brings me to Alaska

Alaska is two and a half Texases. We have more energy under our feet and off our coasts than Texas has ever seen: the gas, the oil, the hydro, the tidal, the geothermal, the wind. We sit closer to Asia than any port in the Lower 48. We're inside the same American platform: same dollar, same capital markets, same freedom for anyone to move here and build.

I've seen the state's balance sheet from the inside: what we own, what it earns, and what it could earn. The gap between those last two numbers is the whole story of this state.

We have roughly 35 trillion cubic feet of known gas sitting on the North Slope with no pipe to carry it, while Cook Inlet runs short and the utilities down here plan to import gas. To Alaska. By the end of the decade. We've been talking about the gas line for fifty years. Somewhere in there, talking became the plan.

Two kinds of places

Here's the plainest way I know to say what that costs. The world is splitting into two kinds of places. The first kind can build, power, permit, finance, and welcome people. Call them growth machines. The second kind mostly manages what it inherited.

Texas is the clearest American example of the first kind. And Alaska, the state with the best raw hand on the continent, has been run for a generation like the second kind. We didn't inherit decline. We administer it, one study and one lawsuit and one deferred decision at a time, and we call the administering being responsible.

The bill for that shows up in one number. Thirteen straight years now, more people have left Alaska than moved here. That's the longest streak since statehood was a rumor: about fifty-seven thousand of us, net.

And where did they go? The number-one destination for departing Alaskans in 2023 was Texas. Almost five thousand in that year alone.

They're part of what's compounding down there, because we handed them a resume and a reason to leave, when what we owed them was a reason to stay.

The window is open

The window to fix it is standing wide open, and it won't stand open long. The next economy, the AI build-out and the reshored factories and the rewired supply chains, runs on exactly one scarce thing, and it's the thing we have the most of: power, and the room to make more of it.

The same forces pouring people and capital into Texas are hunting for the next place with energy to sell and space to build. On that map there is one obvious answer, and we're standing on it.

The platform advantage that lets Texas compound works in both directions: the dollar, the capital, the free movement of Americans. People left fast. Give them something to come back to and they can come back fast.

France, for all its glory, can't easily change what it is. We can. That's the whole difference between inheriting a civilization and compounding one. It's a choice, made by ordinary people in unglamorous rooms, one permit and one pipe and one budget at a time.

Texas already made it. Alaska hasn't. I know which side of that chart I want us on, and I don't think we're more than one honest decade away from it.