For educators and students
Intro courses teach GDP because GDP is the number with data behind it — balance-sheet thinking stays a blackboard exercise for want of an artifact students can actually click through.
The problem with teaching national accounting is that the interesting half has no artifact. You can show students a GDP series in thirty seconds. Showing them what a country owns — produced assets, natural capital, the human and social capital that dwarfs both — means drawing a diagram and asking them to imagine the data existing.
FAND is that missing artifact, and it is browsable. One identity — what a place owns, what it owes, and the trust infrastructure in between — applied from the world down through countries and states to counties. Students can open the hierarchy, expand a branch, and see the same structure recur at each level rather than taking the claim on faith.
The uncertainty is the second lesson, and arguably the better one. Every figure carries a pedigree badge: national numbers are strongest, and anything below the national level is provisional and says so on its face. Most teaching datasets arrive scrubbed of exactly this information, which quietly teaches students that published numbers are simply true. Here the doubt is part of the object. The Currentness Switch makes it tangible — flip between what was actually reported and what has been estimated to fill the gaps, and the cost of a complete time series stops being abstract.
For a seminar, the balance-sheet page is the natural first reading and the scales page is the natural second, because it is candid about how much of the ambition is built versus intended. The capacity essay works well as a discussion piece — it makes a real empirical claim, which means students can attack it, and attacking a finding teaches more than summarising one.
Students arriving on their own should start with the glossary and then the Where-Tree. Find a place you know. The structure makes more sense when the first thing you look at is somewhere you have actually been.
Start here
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Where-Tree explorer Experimental
The collapsible world → country → state → county hierarchy, with per-node download. Provisional below the national level, and labelled so on every figure.
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Featured essay — Capacity, Not Uptake
Compact and empirical, with a claim students can argue with — a good seminar reading precisely because the finding is contestable.
Related pages
- Five spatial scales — The scales the identity is designed for, and how far it is actually built today — the honest version of a diagram most textbooks draw aspirationally.
- Balance sheet equation — The identity itself, term by term. The natural first reading for a seminar.
- Glossary — Definitions for every term in the identity, for students meeting national accounting for the first time.
- The Currentness Switch (OCF demo) Experimental — Toggle between as-reported figures and gap-filled estimates. A ready-made lesson in what an estimate is and what it costs.
Talk to us about classroom use
Everything public here can be used in teaching. If you are building a course around it and need something that does not exist yet — a cleaner extract, a worked example, a figure at a particular scale — tell us what would make it usable and we will see what we can do.