Founders
OconEco is a family enterprise. John's story is in his own words; Sean's below is a first pass, neutral until he voices it himself.
OconEco was founded by John C. O’Connor. We are proud to have begun as a family enterprise: OconEco formalized, in 2006, a collaboration that began after John left the World Bank in 1995 — with Sean, by then already deep into IT, and Carol, equally deep in helping small businesses adapt their financial systems to fast-changing IT and accounting guidelines.
John C. O’Connor
The instruments that make decentralized, market-oriented decisions possible — across three decades inside the Bretton Woods institutions, and three generations of wealth accounting.
I was born a week after Normandy, while the real work of Bretton Woods was under way in Atlantic City. When the IMF and I both turned twenty, I joined it — and spent the next three decades at the Bretton Woods institutions designing and managing the systems central authorities use to decide how and where to allocate resources.
The capstone of that career was Monitoring Environmental Progress (World Bank, 1995) — the report that pioneered modern wealth accounting. The Bank still updates it, most recently as The Changing Wealth of Nations. I took early retirement the year it was published, because the work convinced me of something the institutions weren’t built to act on: our democracy requires more bottom-up decisions. Everything since — the Everglades, Abu Dhabi, Gaia Metrics, sciGaia’s wealth metrics for Montana, and now FAND — has been about building the instruments that make decentralized, market-oriented decisions possible.
FAND is the third generation of that work, and the one the first two were waiting for. What made the 1995 wealth metrics thin was never the concept — it was the cost of quality-controlling qualitative information at scale. Agentic AI has now made that cost collapse. So we are rebuilding the full ledger: what a society owns, what it owes, and the trust infrastructure that never made it onto anyone’s balance sheet.
Career
| Year(s) | Role | One line |
|---|---|---|
| 1964 | Joined the IMF | Decision-support systems just before computerization; “knowledge broker” between systems experts and economists. |
| 1968, 1992 | UN System of National Accounts | Contributor to both SNA revisions. |
| 1982–84 | IMF | Created and managed the Fund’s monitoring system for international banking. |
| 1985 | IMF External Debt Advisor, Bolivia | Debt-crisis fieldwork. |
| 1986–92 | World Bank — Chief of Comparative Analysis & Data | Overhauled the Bank’s decision-support system; architect of what became DataBank; absorbed the formerly planned economies into the data system. Managed per-capita income for Operational Guideline purposes — the key thread leading to FAND. |
| 1992–95 | World Bank — Senior Advisor, Environment Dept. | Created the Bank’s environmental indicator system; manager and primary author of Monitoring Environmental Progress (1995) — origin of The Changing Wealth of Nations. |
| 1996–99 | Florida Center for Environmental Studies | Senior researcher, initial stage of Everglades restoration — bottom-up decision-making in practice. |
| 2006 | UN FAO | Assessed forecasting methodology and projections/history integration. |
| 2007–09 | Environment Agency, Abu Dhabi | Team lead, wealth assessment — Emirate sustainability framework. |
| 2009 | Bibliotheca Alexandrina | Co-chaired SDI & Metrics conference with Ismail Serageldin. |
| 2010–13 | Gaia Metrics (co-founder) | Corporate intangibles and “free” ecoservices; SDR Data Prep; CSR QuickStart with CSRwire. |
| 2015 | sciGaia | Led design of TrueView wealth metrics; primary author, Montana’s Renewable Portfolio. |
| 2006–25 | OconEco | Multi-Local Analytics: a smart grid for decentralized allocation of real as well as financial resources. |
| 2025– | FAND | First Agentic Navigator for Development — the full ledger, rebuilt: 200+ of the 237 economies, 3,000+ US counties, one balance-sheet identity. |
How this work is made
FAND is built by one economist working with agentic AI as a full research partner — drafting, coding, auditing, and challenging, across several hundred logged working sessions. Every number on this site traces to a reproducible pipeline with a source registry and audit trail; every methodological choice is codified in a public Operational Guideline. The workflow itself is part of the proof: the point of FAND is that contextual quality control has become cheap enough for one person and a machine to do what once took a department.
The scale of the current release — 200+ of the 237 economies, 3,258 US counties, a closed balance-sheet identity — is what that workflow makes possible. We say this explicitly because the institutional audience deserves to know how the work gets done.
The book
My Life in Numbers: Bretton Woods and Beyond — a view of the world economy from 1944 to (projected) 2044, from someone who spent the whole run inside its instrument panel. Draft chapters will preview here.
Sean O’Connor
Sean O’Connor co-founded OconEco with John in 2006 and builds the FAND platform: the data pipelines, this site, and the applied-AI tooling behind the agentic research workflow that produces every published number. His background is in IT and software engineering — enterprise search, data platforms, and applied AI — brought to bear on turning John’s wealth-accounting framework into a working, reproducible system.
Working with OconEco
Read about engaging with OconEco commercially, and how to reach us, on the About page.