Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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NYC Economy

After reading about Brits coming to New York to shop I got to thinking about the economics of New York City. What interests me is how diverse the cities revenue stream must be. Clearly finance is a major contributor (according to Wikipedia is accounts for 1/3 of the city’s GDP), but tourism must play a large role as well. As the strength of the dollar decreases, the strength of New York City as an international tourist destination increases. Clearly this isn’t enough to make up for lost revenues, but it’s kind of a fascinating idea to me nonetheless.

Anyhow, in the course of looking for sources of revenue for the city (which I wasn’t able to find and would really appreciate it if someone could track down), I did manage to uncover NYCdata (which has lots of good stats about NYC) and this New York Times article from 1913 which breaks down how the city made it’s $197.7 million.

December 16, 2007