Instruments and sources

Every figure on this site comes from a public source and carries the date of its latest reading. If a source is unavailable, the last good reading stays up with its date. Figures that are estimates say so.

Where the numbers come from

• US Bureau of Labor Statistics ↗
  Average US city prices divided by average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory workers, before tax.
• Federal Reserve Economic Data (MSPUS, AHETPI, MORTGAGE30US) ↗
  Median US new and existing home sale price divided by production-worker hourly earnings, before tax and before any interest.
• US Treasury, Debt to the Penny ↗
  Total public debt outstanding, including debt held by federal accounts. The per-second figure is the average over the past year.
• World Bank Open Data ↗
  Latest world figures published. Birth and death estimates apply the published crude rates to the published population.
• NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory, Mauna Loa ↗
  Monthly mean atmospheric carbon dioxide.
• NASA GISTEMP v4 ↗
  Global surface temperature relative to the 1951–1980 average.

Limits worth knowing

• Hours of work are based on US averages before tax. They do not describe any one person, place or country. A true global ledger is still to be built.
• “Since you arrived” figures apply annual averages to the seconds you have been here. They illustrate scale and are not live counts.
• The visitor count estimates distinct browsers. One person on two devices counts twice, and bots may slip through.
• The human temperature is self-selected. It describes people who came here and chose to answer, not the world’s population.
• Themes are counted from a fixed list of English words, so they miss other languages and all nuance.