Macroeconomics of the United States

This may end up being a very big collection of work and research. Yesterday, on the drive back from Portland, Maine, we started reading about it on Wikipedia.

Going through the facts, I started to realize that having a chart/comparative tool for all of these metrics would be very helpful:

Maine facts:

• Largest state in New England by total area
• 12th-smallest by area
• 9th-least populous
• 13th-least densely populated
• Most rural state
• Population: 1.4M
• Total area: 35.4k square miles (4.5k is water)
• Median household income: 56k USD/year

These are somewhat interesting facts. It reveals something that the largest state in New England is the 12th-smallest state in the country (New England has all the smallest states).

Questions to Explore

• How many people in the population are employed?
• What do they do?
• How many people work for companies versus are self-employed?
• Of the working population, how many work remotely?

The idea is to get a picture of how each state functions. What kind of people live there, how much do they make, what do they do? To have a good concept of that for every state is extremely valuable for perspective.

Data Sources

I had ChatGPT together the beginning of a script to fetch this data using:

• BLS API for employment data
• Census API for demographics

Hosting Ideas

• Heroku no longer has a free plan
• Render (https://render.com/pricing) has a free tier
• Can cache data results as a JSON file and periodically update

I'm putting a pin in this for now. Will pick back up later.