v1.2
Organization of the site
The site is organized into three sections: blog, questions, and about. The blog posts are always titled with a question similar to my first post: How much U.S. currency is currently in circulation?. Each post or question will have a version. Therefore, posts will updated as we go with new information. If you need to understand some other concept or definition within the answer I’ll “point” to it at the top in the prerequsites section.
Some of the questions will be a bit sexier than others but they will all share a similar format. At the top there’s a version number. The answers to the questions evolve and therefore each “major” or “minor” iteration has a version number. Each question can also be found “in context” in the questions page.
Why “hack” in hackeconomics?
So this post is entitled “hello world” for a reason. Despite this being a blog about economics it is rooted in a programming paridigm. I constantly see programming patterns in real life and therefore think they can be applied to everything. This may make me delussional but that could be interesting as well. Hacking to me is breaking down problems into workable chunks to better understand them. So much of economics today is mired in unneeded complexity or an assumption that we understand countlesss definitions and dependencies of a given chart or article. I want to change that.
What is FRED?
Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) is an invaluable database of information about the US economy and other world economiesmaintained by the Research division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. I highly recommend checking it out.