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This map plots the first year in which the U.S. had the same GDP per capita, adjusted for prices, as other countries around the world do today. For instance, India has a GDP per capita of $6,600 today; the US had a GDP per capita of $6,600 in 1898, so India today is about as rich as the US was in 1898.
This doesn’t take account of the distribution of incomes within countries in different years. GDP per capita is essentially the mean income of a country. However, poor people in countries with higher GDP per capita will almost always have lower incomes than poor people in countries with lower GDP per capita.
Some countries in the 2000-2016 bracket are actually richer than the United States is today. Countries in the 0-1800 bracket are poorer than the United States was in 1800, which is the earliest year for which I have data on U.S. GDP.
The data on the GDP of countries today is from the IMF’s World Economic Outlook for April 2017, specifically the series “Gross domestic product based on purchasing-power-parity (PPP) per capita GDP”. The data on the historical GDP of the United States is from the Maddison Project database. The Maddison Project data is in 1990 dollars, but I converted it into 2016 dollars by comparing that data to the IMF’s data for the U.S.
