Title: The Consumer Price Index (CPI) measures inflation and, in the words of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, &quot;directly affects hundreds of millions of Americans&quot;.<p>I would have guessed the data used to construct the CPI would be open to everyone.<p>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.<p>So, does anyone know why this data cannot be obtained?<p>Reference: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;opub&#x2F;hom&#x2F;cpi&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;cpi.pdf
Upvote: