When the Federal Reserve and Smartphones Collide...

Today I am at the National Conference on Teaching Economics, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts and hosted by the American Economic Association's Committee on Economic Education. These conferences are usually pretty educational, both because the talks are interesting and also because the other conference attendees tend to show me cool new nerdy stuff.

This time, the new stuff is in the form of iPhone (and Android, I am told) apps offered by a couple of the U.S. Federal Reserve branches. If you search for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on iTunes, for example, you will find two interesting apps. The first is called "FRED Economic Data," and it provides easy access to, not surprisingly, the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), which consists of 34,000 or so economic data series organized by category and such. (In other words, you can make a lot of graphs to impress your friends.) The second app is called "Econ Ed Mobile," and you can use this app to mess around with inflation and cost of credit and play some challenge games and whatnot to test your knowledge.

Not wanting to get left behind, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has an app called "What is a Dollar Worth?" that provides Consumer Price Index (CPI) comparisons from 1913 until today, so, if nothing else, you can empirically prove to your kids on the fly that a dollar was worth more in your day. :)