Sources & methodology
Where every number comes from, and the rules it follows.
Data sources
Macro time-series come from FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) and BLS. Regional income, rent, and home values come from the Census Bureau's ACS. State output and personal income come from the BEA. State boundaries come from Census cartographic files, simplified to TopoJSON.
How figures are pulled
A scheduled job pulls each series and writes it to a database. The site reads from that cache at page load. It never calls a source API while you wait, so a slow or down API never takes the site with it.
Revisions and dates
Figures are the latest revised values by default. Every number shows its source and the date it is current as of. For a few series, the first-reported figure differs from the final one, and that history gets surfaced later where it teaches something.
Political and policy markers
Recessions, administrations, and policy eras are shown as overlays on the data. They carry dates and a factual label, never a claim that one caused the other. Presidents inherit economies, and effects lag. Multiple eras are shown together so nothing is cherry-picked.
This page fills in per-series as each indicator is wired.