I am sorry for the delay in responding to people -- I've been out on web trying to scare up some data. The last time I made a serious attempt to find data on the net was a couple of years ago, and I was disappointed at how little I could find. But now everything has changed! The most useful single source seems to be a large international database (called IDB, what else) on 227 countries that can be downloaded from the US census people, who are at http://www.census.gov/ -- they also provide US only data, of course, in more detail. There is a lot of detailed information available from US, Canadian, and UK governments about labour and unemployment, income, expenditures, saving, and so on. I'll report later on what seems most useful. I now realize that the simulator will have to be equipped with programs to read data in a variety of formats, so I'll have to add that to the requirements. Some formats are quite nice -- the IDB mentioned above has its own access program which I don't find very useful, but the data files are in standard Clipper DBF and NTX formats, which I know how to read. On the other hand there is a lot of data that I can obtain easily enough but will have to do a lot of messy reformating to get rid of material intended for human readers. I'm thinking about setting up a quick prototype using some of the data I've already collected, as a demo to help explain the advantages of simulation to people unfamiliar with the idea. More on that later. dpw Douglas P. Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/index.html
