Location dimensions

True Return on Investment (TRoI) is designed to let client views of the future alter baseline projections. It modifies orthodox macro-projections of costs and benefits by client's estimates of local imperfections, and how long they will persist.

Economics aspires to be dimensionless; applicable through time and space like its role model, classical physics. Our priors are closer to Keynes' "in the long run we are all dead." As Brad de Long shows, Keynes meant we must give "proper balance to the short run and the long run". M-LA adds we must balance local and global/national scales.

This means seeing the world as many thousands of basic observation units; not a few hundred nations. Subordinate units (Counties in the US) evolve, or don't, over time; on similar or disparate paths. National aggregates can then be as misleading as informative. The empirical challenge is then to qualify simple averages with pattern detection. Our current favorite is a matched model approach to causal inference.