Gordon — U.S. Prices & Employment, Decomposed
A national price index and a national unemployment rate are averages, and an average conceals the thing you wanted to know. Gordon takes both apart: consumer prices down to 400 item strata across 58 areas (935,137 observations, through 2026-06), and the labor market down to 79 geographies and 6 measures (247,438 observations, through 2026-05). Everything here is built from primary statistical releases, and every figure on this page is read from the file that produced it.
Named for three Gordons
- Robert J. Gordon
- The Measurement of Durable Goods Prices (1990), the 1996 Boskin Commission on the consumer price index, and The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016) are one long argument about what a price index does and does not capture — quality change, new goods, substitution. That question is answered one item at a time, which is why this site’s price product is an item-level decomposition rather than a headline series.
- David M. Gordon
- His work on labor-market segmentation and the social structures of accumulation held that there is no single labor market: the same work is paid differently depending on which segment, industry and place it sits in. That is the claim behind the wage-by-industry-by-place views — employment and pay read by area and industry rather than as one national total.
- Margaret S. Gordon
- Her scholarship on employment policy and social insurance was about what employment statistics are for: who bears unemployment, and whether policy reaches them. That is a question you cannot ask of a national rate, so this site carries the state and local labor-market decomposition — including participation and the employment-to-population ratio alongside the unemployment rate, which is what distinguishes people finding work from people leaving.
The decompositions
The Item Ledger
→Consumer prices taken apart: 400 item strata across 58 Bureau of Labor Statistics areas — the national city average, the census regions and divisions, and individual metropolitan areas. Pick an item, pick the places, download the rows.
935,137 observations · 4,035 series · 1997-01–2026-06 A separate, older vintage carries the same concept back to 1913-01 — shipped as its own file, never merged in.The Local Labor Market
→6 labor-market measures across 79 geographies — regions, divisions, every state, and large metropolitan areas. Unemployment, participation and the employment-to-population ratio side by side, so a falling unemployment rate can be read for what actually caused it.
247,438 observations · 422 series · 1976-01–2026-05 County and industry tiers ship too, and both are older (2025-06 and 2025-06) — labelled, never blended.The Price Map
→The same question asked about levels rather than rates of change: not how much a basket moved, but what it costs — and where. Dollar prices for 159 items by area, a metropolitan cost comparison across 158 places, and daily wholesale quotes from 11 terminal markets.
221,489 dollar prices · 3,386 metropolitan comparisons · 721,840 daily wholesale rows Three sources on three clocks, never merged: dollar prices through 2025-06, the cost map through 2023, wholesale through 2026-07-24.Inflation Decomposer
→The headline index broken into its major components, with a drill-down into sub-components. National detail plus the four census regions.
7 components · national + 4 census regionsExplorer & Studies
→The 16 curated chart-series — inflation, the labor market, the labeled heterodox lens and structural change — plus 3 chart-backed studies carrying the interpretation.
16 charts · 3 studies · CSV / XLSX / Parquet on every oneWhat’s here
Two layers ship together and are labeled as two. The first is a neutral, fully-sourced data layer: official price and employment statistics, decomposed to the finest grain the published data supports, with the underlying rows downloadable from every chart. The second is a labeled heterodox reading of those numbers — distributive conflict and turbulent competition rather than a stable trade-off between inflation and unemployment — carried in the Studies and marked as interpretation wherever it appears.
Start with The Item Ledger if you want to know which items produced an inflation print and where; with The Local Labor Market if you want to know which places produced a national employment number; with the Explorer if you would rather browse the curated charts. The Methodology states every source, unit and limit, including the ones that are inconvenient.
Built from primary statistical releases — the Bureau of Labor Statistics price and labor-force programmes, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and Federal Reserve research measures. Freshness on this page is the last real observation in each product, not the date the site was built. Where two vintages of the same concept are held, both ship and each is labeled; they are never silently merged. Nothing here is fabricated, and where a figure is not held the page says so rather than estimating it. Full provenance: Methodology · Data & downloads.