For journalists
Every economics story defaults to the growth number, because the growth number is the one that gets published — the wealth story, the one readers actually feel, has no accessible ledger behind it.
The economics desk runs on releases. GDP prints, the jobs number, permits, sales-tax receipts — a calendar of production statistics arrives on schedule, and the story writes itself around whichever one moved. It is a beat built on what gets published rather than on what your readers experience.
What they experience is closer to a balance sheet. Whether the place they live got wealthier or poorer. Whether the household down the street can absorb a bad year. Whether the county owns anything it has not already borrowed against. Those are stock questions, and the production statistics simply do not answer them — GDP is booked where the work happens, not where people live, so a bedroom county doing the actual absorbing shows up in someone else’s column.
FAND is the ledger that answers the stock question: what a place owns, what it owes, and the trust infrastructure in between, on one identity that runs from the national scale down through states to counties. The national figures are the strongest and can be cited plainly. Below that they are provisional and labelled as such on their face — which for your purposes is a feature rather than a hedge. A number that carries its own pedigree is a number you can quote responsibly, with the caveat already written for you rather than invented under deadline.
Start by finding the place you cover in the Where-Tree. Look at the Duval County panel to see how a local ledger is assembled and which rows are solid. Then read the capacity finding — it is the kind of result that reframes a story about a struggling town from what its people are failing to do into what the place never gave them the opportunity to do.
If you are checking a figure against its documentation before filing, the NUSAP page is the one to read. It sets out exactly what each badge means, which is the difference between a provisional number used carefully and a provisional number used wrongly.
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; the honesty badge travels with every figure.
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Featured essay — Capacity, Not Uptake
A local finding with a reportable shape: what predicts a community's hidden wealth is the opportunity to participate, not the participation itself.
Related pages
- Duval County, FL — county annex Experimental — What a local ledger looks like as a labelled sample panel — useful for seeing the shape of the story before the figures for your own county exist.
- US counties — commuter flows dominate — Why production numbers misattribute value at exactly the scale most local reporting happens.
- Global — The national-scale picture, where the figures are strongest and citable without hedging.
- NUSAP — data quality — The pedigree scheme behind the badges. This is the page that tells you, in print-ready terms, how far a given number can be pushed.
Talk to us about a story
If you are working on something where the wealth question matters more than the growth question, tell us what you need and what your deadline is. We would rather walk you through what a figure can and cannot support than have it appear in print without its caveat.