The main idea of this project is to do a video game presentation of economic data, which was inspired by the fact that games like World of Warcraft rely on huge spreadsheets that define the economy of the game.
http://equitymaps.com (applet, requires Java 1.5 or higher.)
ControlsBasic internet map controls apply:
* LMB - drag
* scroll wheel zooms. Also, ctrl+LMB zooms as well.
* also, space pauses animation.
The stationary sprites are sectors of the economy. If you hover over one, you can see its inputs, highlighted in cyan, and outputs, highlighted in magenta. You can select a sector by clicking on it.
Commodities are shown traveling from the seller to the buyer. The size of the transaction represents its dollar amount. Labor is shown as a transaction between households and industries. Households sell their labor to industries, so the transaction is animated going from households to industries. This may be a little bit counterintuitive, but I had to be consistent with my choice to animate transactions. Each transaction has two pieces: cash flows from the buyer to the seller, and goods and services flow from the seller to the buyer. If I animated both, the circular flow of money would be obscured, so I only animated one side of the transaction.
The source data is the BEA Input-Output Accounts, which show the detail behind the GDP. The GDP represents the finished product. If you buy a plate of General Tsao’s chicken at the local Chinese buffet, the input-output accounts show how much production was required in chicken farming, transportation, refrigeration, food preparation, real estate, marketing, paper production, etc, etc to give you that $5 worth of food. All of these intermediate inputs to deliver the $5 worth of food are like the technological recipe. The GDP only shows the sum of all intermediate inputs across all industries: if the I-O accounts are the recipe, the GDP is the nutrition label.
Ideally, you can play around with this map and kind of get a feel for what the biggest sectors are in our economy and how they fit together. I'm still working on it, so any comments are welcome.
Future work:
* adding time series data. Right now it only shows the data for 2007.
* adding employment data.
* umm, this crazy thing called 'graphics'?
* fixing bugs in the model. Right now, some of the money earned by the government and private industry isn't getting spent. Money leaks out of the system, and eventually the economy comes to a halt.
Take a look at the blog for a longer explanation and links to the source data.
-Russell
Developer
