When numbers have time

Debt is an abstraction. A line in a press release, a cell in a budget report, a blank in the Bank of Korea’s ECOS — it rests there until the next release. This site gives time back to those frozen numbers: it takes the most recent official snapshot as the starting point and interpolates each instant using the published annual growth rates.

The method

Every card is computed with a simple compound interpolation: value(t) = base × (1 + g)^((t − t₀) / 1y). Both base and g come from the official statistics as of the base date shown at the top of the page. This is not measurement but estimation, always refreshed at the next release.

Why show it

Debt becomes political only when its speed is visible. A counter ticking by the second makes the increment — not the absolute — legible. “2,500 trillion won” is abstract; “12 million won every second” is concrete. We hope that concreteness nudges the civic sense of macro.

Limitations

These are interpolated estimates. Policy, FX, or rate shocks will pull actual statistics off this trend. Source links appear on every card — for decisions, always check the primary data.

Data limits and reliability

The live figures on screen are estimates interpolated between two official releases, and the next confirmed print can revise them after the fact. Not every series carries the same weight either, so each one is tagged by confidence — official (confirmed), estimate (interpolated), or proxy (a stand-in indicator). For anything that matters, follow the source under each card and read the primary data yourself.

How to use and cite

When you quote a figure in an article or paper, use the snapshot API (/api/korea/snapshot.json), which pins a single instant. Copy the baseAsOf and citeAs fields from the response and your reference becomes reproducible. To put the numbers on your own page, build an embed in the widget studio (/widget/studio) or call the public JSON API directly. Treat this site as a companion that adds a sense of time to otherwise frozen official statistics — never a replacement for them.