Lesson: What Is Economics and Why It Is Important
Introduction to FRED
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Data are very important in economics because they describe and measure the issues that the field of economics seeks to understand. A variety of government agencies publish economic and social data. For this course, we will generally use data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Economic Data (FRED) database. FRED is very user friendly. It allows you to display data in tables or charts, and you can easily download the data in a spreadsheet form, if you want to use them for other purposes. The FRED website includes data on nearly 400,000 domestic and international variables over time, in the following broad categories:
- money, banking and finance
- population, employment, and labor markets (including income distribution)
- national accounts such as Gross Domestic Product and its components, Flow of Funds, and International Accounts
- production and business activity (including business cycles)
- prices and inflation (including the Consumer Price Index, the Producer Price Index, and the Employment Cost Index)
- international data from other nations
- regional data from areas within the U.S.
- academic data (including Penn World Tables & NBER Macro-History database)
If you still do not believe that scarcity is a problem, consider the following:
- Does everyone require food to eat?
- Does everyone need a decent place to live?
- Does everyone have access to healthcare?
In every country in the world, there are people who are hungry, homeless (like those who call park benches their beds), or in need of healthcare, just to focus on a few critical goods and services. Why is this the case? It is because of scarcity. Let’s delve into the concept of scarcity a little deeper, because it is crucial for understanding economics.