It appears that the American October Consumer Price Index (CPI) will not be calculated by the Bureau of Labor [sic] Statistics (BLS), courtesy of the now-ended shutdown. Since the CPI calculations rely on an extremely large survey of data on a particular set of dates, the absence of employees making that survey makes it impossible to recover that data point.

Although this is not too big a deal, I just want to comment on some arcane side effects of this hole in the data.

Does it Matter for Cost-of-...