LLM Reconstructs a Century of US Consumer Price Index
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-07-20
## Research: Reconstructing a Century of US Living Standard Growth with LLMs This working paper uses **5.1 million product records from Sears catalogs** to build a quality-adjusted price index spanning **1900–1990**, offering a more granular measure of real living standard changes for US consumer goods in the 20th century. The authors draw two core conclusions: - **US economic growth in the 20th century was higher than estimated by official or traditional methods**; - The primary peaks of this growth **occurred before World War II, rather than after**. The sharer highlights that the real breakthrough of this study is using **LLMs as data engineering tools** to create a hedonic price index from massive historical catalog data.
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