“Oh my stars,” we breathe as we feast our eyes on the glorious spread before us. Our senses are overwhelmed. There’s so much to look at, so much to take in. What is it? Have we found some Aztec gold? Blackbeard’s treasure? The entire database of Minecraft cheat codes? No, friends, it’s even better—we’ve stumbled upon the website for the National Bureau of Economic Research. And there is So. Much. To see.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, or NBER, is a private nonprofit organization dedicated solely and completely to helping people understand economics. And if that doesn’t get the heart pounding, allow us to go on: they publish studies, graphs, articles, models, and pretty much anything and everything a person could hope to clap their peepers on in terms of economic research and analysis.
And all we have to do to clap our own peepers on everything the NBER has to offer is become a subscriber, a journalist, a government employee, a NBER corporate associate, or a resident of a developing or transitioning nation. If we don’t want to go any of those routes—moving to Burma just to read some economic studies seems a little extreme—they also have plenty of content available for free, like their monthly digest and a bunch of recorded lectures. Twelve of their researchers have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, which is kind of a big deal.
Basically, the NBER is an economics panacea, and we’ll take that over cheat codes and Aztec gold any day.
