A US senator recently gave a speech where she/he made the claim that “the 200’0’s are the worst decade
since the 1980’s.” You are the fact-checker for an economic research firm and your boss has asked you to
check the veracity of this claim and he wants you to support your findings with data. Your task is to write a
memorandum to your boss providing your best arguments as to whether or not the Senator’s claim is backed
by the data.
Start by collecting the data for each year since the 1980 on three of the most important macroeconomic
indicators:
US real GDP growth rate,
US inflation rate, and
US unemployment rate.
Put the data in a table, and create a chart to illustrate each variable graphically. Be sure to report the sources
of your data in enough detail so that I can easily find them. For each variable, your citation should include the
title of the source, the page(s), and the table(s) from which your information was obtained. The next step is to
analyze the data: Think of a good way to describe the growth rate of real GDP in each decade. Next, compare
the growth rates across the decades. Do the same analysis for the inflation and unemployment rates. What
conclusions can you draw about the macroeconomic performance of the economy during the 2000s compared
with its performance in the 1980s and the 1990s? Do those conclusions support or reject the Senator’s claim?
What evidence leads you to those conclusions?