The main idea of this project is to do a video game presentation of economic data, which was inspired by the fact that games like World of Warcraft rely on huge spreadsheets that define the economy of the game. Real-world data may be more interesting than imaginary data. Then again, the imaginary data is specifically crafted for enjoyment, so real-world economic data may not be good source material.

I think some things may not be worth what we’re paying for them, the whole GDP versus happiness debate. I think that we should understand the entire industrial process we participate in. I think that Wal Mart creates bad jobs, and we can see that by looking at how things are produced. But I also think Wal Mart saves us money. I want people to see how saving money makes the pie bigger, even as it puts some people out of work. One of the biggest unanswered questions in economics today is how to assimilate victims of productivity back into the workforce. I think some people just earn too much money, and I want to show overpriced occupations.

EM shows the process in motion, and the relative sizes of things. I still don’t quite understand how money works, and how money circulates. EM makes the process more clear, and shows the biggest parts, but it’s harder to read, once you have the understanding of how the system works, than the original spreadsheet. Economists, I think, already know all this stuff. Equity Maps is not a tool that economists will use to do research. It’s illustrative, not predictive.

More specifically, it is designed to let you explore a large, pretty hard to interpret and explore spreadsheet: the BEA Input-Output Accounts. The input-output accounts show the detail behind the GDP. The GDP represents the finished product. If you buy a plate of General Tsao’s chicken at the local Chinese buffet, the input-output accounts show how much production was required in chicken farming, transportation, refrigeration, food preparation, real estate, marketing, paper production, etc, etc to give you that $5 worth of food. All of these intermediate inputs to deliver the $5 worth of food are like the technological recipe. The GDP only shows the sum of all intermediate inputs across all industries: if the I-O accounts are the recipe, the GDP is the nutrition label.

The commodity – chicken, sugar, etc – is shown traveling from the seller to the buyer. The size of the transaction represents its dollar amount. Profit is what is referred to on the I-O accounts spreadsheet as value-added. This is where money flows from industries back to people: money is spent on payroll, which consumers spend, money is reinvested in the company, money is paid out to business owners as dividends, and money is paid as taxes. In the Gross Domestic Product equation, GDP = C + I + G + X – M, all of these sectors are entities which spend value-added money. In other words, transactions between businesses are part of a fixed technological recipe, whereas purchases from the C, I, G, X and M sectors represent consumer preference and choice. This is another question that Equity Maps is designed to explore: no one can control how General Tsao’s chicken is made, but let’s say for the sake of example that producing $1 worth of General Tsao’s required some huge percentage, $0.90, of some environmentally and economically disasterous intermediate input, like we all had to live as basically slaves in some spice mine, whereas Sweet and Sour chicken required more benign intermediate inputs. In general, our decisions as C in the GDP equation shape the world we live in in ways that markets don’t address. Is something more valuable because it creates better jobs? That is what I want to explore with the input-output accounts that isn’t addressed by the GDP.

Labor is shown as a transaction between households and industries. Households sell their labor to industries, so the transaction is animated going from households to industries. This may be a little bit counterintuitive, but I had to be consistent with my choice to animate transactions. Each transaction has two pieces: cash flows from the buyer to the seller, and goods and services flow from the seller to the buyer. If I animated both, the circular flow of money would be obscured, so I only animated one side of the transaction.

In addition to showing transactions between sectors, Equity Maps also shows the money supply. The money supply equals the sum of all visible transactions plus the cash balance at each sector. While a transaction is navigating from the seller to the buyer, the money is in limbo. This game mechanic represents the fact that money does not flow instantly. Economists refer to this as the velocity of money.