The United States is one of the richest countries in the world, but it would look dramatically different if its 50 states were organized according to income instead of geography. If that were the case, residents of the poorest state in the union would have a median household income that's just above the federal poverty line for a family of four. They would also expect to live shorter lives than people in more than half of the world's countries.

“In essence, there are several developing countries hidden within the borders of the United States — regions defined, in this case, by poverty,” they wrote in a study published last week in the American Journal of Public Health. “The ‘state' of poverty in this country is dramatic and deeply disturbing.”

The research team, from East Tennessee State University took the country's 3,141 counties and sorted them according to median household income, the amount at which half of households in a county had higher earnings and half had lower earnings.

The 2 percent of counties with the lowest median household income comprised the poorest “state” in their alternative USA. The next 2 percent of counties formed the second-poorest “state.” They continued this process until they had 50 new “states,” each with 62 or 63 counties.

The poorest “state” was made up of actual counties from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia. The richest “state” included real counties from Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Ohio, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Utah, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

Five real states contributed counties to both the poorest and richest “states.” This shows that “some of the challenges associated with poverty in the United States are related to factors associated with unequal distribution of resources within states, as opposed to simple lack of resources,” the researchers wrote.

The differences between the poorest “state” and the richest “state” were stark:

The median household income in the poorest “state” was $24,960. In the richest “state,” $89,723.

The average number of people per county was about 14,000 in the poorest “state,” compared with about 362,000 in the richest “state.”

Although the poorest “state” had a much smaller population, the ratio of people to primary care doctors there was twice that of the richest “state.”

Life expectancy for women in the poorest “state” was 75.9 years, compared with 83 years in the richest “state.” For men, life expectancy in the poorest “state” was 69.8 years and 79.3 in the richest “state.”