I have no doubt that most of the nerdy among us have wondered at
one point or another how much the gifts in the 12 Days of
Christmas song actually cost. (Or at the very least the song
brings to mind the storyline in The Office where Andy gifts Erin
all 12 days of items via secret santa, with disastrous
consequences of course.) Apparently the job of actually
calculating this belongs to some poor sap at PNC Financial. Of
course. As if this isn’t bad enough, I am now going to take this
opportunity to talk about inflation and the Consumer Price
Index. Inflation, as you likely know, is a measure of the change
in an aggregate price level in an economy. That said, there are
many ways to calculate an aggregate price level. One way would
be to add up the prices of one of each thing in an economy.
Another would be to weight each item in the economy by how much
of it is produced and sold. And so on. (For real examples of
such things, you can check out the GDP deflator and the Producer
Price Index.) In order to determine