The Flourishing Life Year — the FLY — is a single number that measures whether a place sustains a flourishing life. One Flourishing Life Year equals one year lived under reference-quality conditions across five domains: purchasing power, wealth, family, health, and useful education. We publish Flourishing Life Years for every county, every year, from the same open federal data that powers GDP itself.
A Flourishing Life Year is the amount of human flourishing a place produces for one resident in one year. If the conditions around you — your earnings, your savings, your family, your health, your education — match a national reference, that counts as one Flourishing Life Year. If they fall short, the year counts for less. If they exceed it, for more.
The Flourishing Life Year borrows from the Quality-Adjusted Life Year used in health economics, but generalizes it. A year in a county where the median paycheck buys 70% of the national basket, where homeownership is out of reach, where life expectancy is five years below average, isn't the same year as one lived at reference. It's a discounted year — and the discount is exactly what the five domains measure.
Multiply Flourishing Life Years per person by population and you get total Flourishing Life Years — a stock of flourishing that a county, a state, or the country produces each year. It sums cleanly, it moves meaningfully, and unlike GDP it answers the question GDP can't: is the life this economy supports actually a good one?
Each domain contributes a discount factor to the Flourishing Life Year calculation. Each is built from federal indicators that exist at county level, normalized against a national reference. Strong in one, weak in another, and the Flourishing Life Year product tells you exactly how the trade-off resolves for that place.
Real purchasing power: what the local median wage actually buys after housing, groceries, utilities, transport, and childcare — benchmarked to a national reference and broken out by household archetype.
A composite proxy for household balance-sheet health: homeownership, home equity, retirement contribution rates, small business density, mortgage delinquency, and intergenerational mobility.
Marriage, fertility, two-parent household share, household stability, and the affordability of the conditions that make family life viable.
Life expectancy at birth, healthy life expectancy, and the prevalence of chronic disease, mental distress, and deaths of despair. Not just years — usable years.
Not degrees for their own sake. Useful education: reading and numeracy by 8th grade, credential completion, and earnings-linked outcomes 6 and 10 years after graduation.
Every indicator is sourced from a public federal dataset, transformed in the open, and scored transparently. If a county-level number doesn't exist honestly, we don't fabricate one. Some gaps stay gaps — and we say so.
Pull from Census, BEA, BLS, IRS SOI, CDC, NCES, HMDA, and HUD. No proprietary data, no private licenses, no black-box APIs.
Crosswalk tract and county geographies to a consistent unit. Impute only where methodologically defensible. Flag every interpolation.
Normalize each indicator against a national benchmark. Weight within domains. Composite using documented aggregation rules.
Release data, code, and methodology together. Version every update. Show uncertainty. Let anyone reproduce the result.
A rank-order that's right is worth more than a decimal score that's wrong. Where the data can't support county-level precision, we aggregate up rather than invent.
The composite matters less than its components. Every page shows the underlying indicators driving the score — drill down until the claim is falsifiable.
Methodology, source list, transformation code, and raw outputs are all public. If you can't reproduce our number, it's a bug.
GDP asks how much a country produces. The Flourishing Life Year asks what it's producing it for.