James Surowiecki wants a better the Consumer Price Index:
The government continues to track inflation, for instance, by gathering price data much as it did in the nineteen-fifties: it surveys consumers by phone to see where they buy, surveys businesses to see how much they charge, checks out shopping malls to price goods. This leaves out consumers who have only cell phones, and it probably overstates inflation by not fully accounting for things like the impact of big-box stores. The larger problem, though, is the time it takes: the Consumer Price Index’s figures don’t come out until a month after the fact. In turbulent times, that’s too slow.
He compares it with a new operation, the Billion Prices Project, which could act as the "first real-time inflation index":
The B.P.P., which was designed by the M.I.T. economists Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon, gathers price data not via survey but, rather, by continuously scouring the Web for prices of online goods around the world. (In the U.S., it collects more than half a million prices daily—five times the number that the government looks at.)
The Dish 