Why can't you get the data used to create the Consumer Price Index (CPI)?

70 points

5 years ago

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) measures inflation and, in the words of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, "directly affects hundreds of millions of Americans".

I would have guessed the data used to construct the CPI would be open to everyone.

But no, it appears to be unavailable and it is instead a black box due to rules of confidentiality. What is strange is, it appears much of the data is publicly available data. For example, 8% comes from e-commerce sites, the USPS public website, etc. If you browse through the categories, you can also see that almost all the data could be collected from public sources - APIs, websites, etc.

So, does anyone know why this data cannot be obtained?

Reference: https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi/pdf/cpi.pdf

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