Can you model the entire economy?
2025-12-15After listening to a lot of economics podcasts the only thing I have learned is that everything is speculative. We don't know what's going to happen in the future, but smart people can take a good guess. But more interestingly sometimes we don't even know what's happened in the past and smart people again have to make a guess about why things turned out the way that they did.
So why couldn't you build a digital model of the economy that starts with adding up everything consumers bought and integrates that into the top line of the economy? Obviously we don't have access (thank god) to see every single purchase that is made, but I think we could start somewhere. To me it's wild that amazon and other retailers now just tell you "1500+ people bought this month" on every product. Certainly that could be a place to start. I think with enough data sources you could get an interesting picture. Even the incomplete picture would be insightful too, for example where would the major gaps in the money be?