Real GDP per Capita

Looked up Real GDP per Capita annual at FRED. Got 1225 search results.

Filtered for Geography Type: Nation and for Geographies: United States of America. Now, 7 search results.

Omitting the results that pertain to subsets

• Real DPI per Capita
• Metropolitan Portion
• Consumption Share
• Investment Share, and
• Government Consumption Share

I am left with two datasets:

Constant GDP per capita for the United States and

Real GDP per Capita in the United States (DISCONTINUED) 

The one is in 2010 dollars and the other is in 2011 dollars, so I can't even compare them easily. And I hafta start by comparing them. So I put em on a graph.

The discontinued series ends in 2011, and both of them start in 1960. I was 11 years old in 1960. We should what, ignore those early years? WTF. 

So I looked up an old post of mine and read:

At FRED, this Real gross domestic product per capita page links to Table 7.1, which identifies FRED series B230RC0Q173SBEA as the relevant population measure for the per capita calculation. FRED calls that measure "Population". But when I search FRED for population, I get 107,803 results. So I call it "B23". I checked my arithmetic. Yes, that's the right population data for per capita GDP.

I took FRED's Real Gross Domestic Product series and divided it by the "B23" population measure, then corrected the units, and got my own version of Real GDP per Capita, with data that goes back to 1947. FRED offers 824,000 datasets from 114 different sources, and I have to make my own Per Capita GDP.

Maybe there's some detail I don't know about, a detail that explains why the data before 1960 is not valid. But I don't know about any such detail, so I'm good for now. I put my version on the graph with the others. Here's the graph:

Graph #1: Three Measures of GDP per Capita. Mine is the Green one.

Usually I make the lines thicker before I reduce the image size to fit the blog. Didn't do that this time because the green and red lines are so close together. To see the graph bigger click the image. Or click Graph #1 in the caption to see it at FRED.