For county and local officials

GDP is measured where the work happens, not where your people live — so the wealth you actually steward is invisible in the national accounts.

You govern a place, not an economy. But the instruments you are handed measure the economy — payrolls, permits, sales-tax receipts, the county’s slice of a state GDP figure. All of it tracks the fuel burn. None of it tracks the hull.

Here is the glitch, concretely. GDP is booked where the work happens, not where people live. A bedroom county and the downtown county next door look nearly identical on a production map — the office towers get the credit, and the households that earned the income, built the housing stock, funded the schools, and hold the retirement claims are recorded as a rounding note somewhere else. The thing you actually steward — what your county owns, what it owes, and the trust infrastructure in between — has no ledger at all.

FAND builds that ledger. The same balance-sheet identity that runs for 200+ of the 237 economies runs at the county scale, fed by courthouse records and administrative rolls where the federal agency panels stop. The numbers at this scale are provisional and say so on their face — every figure carries an honesty badge, and the watermark travels with every export. We would rather show you a labeled draft of your county’s balance sheet than a confident number about someone else’s.

Start with the shape of one: Duval County, Florida — our home county, shown as a labelled sample panel so you can see how a county ledger is assembled and where each row comes from. Then find yours in the Where-Tree. Then read the finding that made us take counties seriously in the first place: what predicts a community’s hidden wealth is not how many people participate, but how many could.