The Wall Street Journal reports on an alternative to the system currently used by statisticians at the Labor Department:
Economists Roberto Rigobon and Alberto Cavallo at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management have come up with a method to scour the Internet for online prices on millions of items and then use them to calculate inflation statistics for a dozen countries on a daily basis. The two have been collecting data for the project for more than three years, but only made their results public this week.
Michael Bordo, economist for Rutgers University said “It seems to me it’s a brilliant way of measuring the deep fundamentals of inflation.”
