Computing, communications, energy, and transportation got dramatically cheaper over the last 35 years. The money supply went the other way. The Deflation Index measures both, in one place, with every number sourced.
See what we found →And yet rent tripled. Healthcare compounded. College got four times more expensive. If technology is this deflationary, why doesn't daily life reflect it?
Traditional price indices blend everything into one number. The Deflation Index does something different: it isolates the technological-progress side of the economy — four sectors where we can actually measure cost per unit of capability — and sets it next to monetary expansion (M2) and consumer prices (CPI) so the gap becomes visible.
It's not a theory of what happened. It's a measurement of where the progress went.
Computing dropped 99%. Communications 99%. Energy 90%. Transportation 88%. Combined into a weighted index rebased to 100 in 1990, the Deflation Index closed 2024 at 3.74.
Each line tells a different story. CPI says prices rose modestly. M2 says money expanded 6.5x. The DI says the underlying capability economy collapsed in cost. Put them together and you get the central question this project exists to surface.
The weighted Deflation Index covers 1990–2024, the range for which every sector has measured data. M2 and CPI extend through 2025 (FRED M2SL + BLS CPI-U, retrieved April 2026). The 2025 weighted-DI recalculation arrives in v4.0, gated on IRENA & NREL.
All indexed to 100 in 1990. Technology fell. Money supply rose. Consumer prices tracked somewhere in between. M2 and CPI extend through 2025; the Deflation Index ends at 2024 pending IRENA & NREL 2025 data.
Deflation Index (teal) vs. M2 money supply (brick) vs. CPI (neutral). Data: FRED (M2SL, CPIAUCSL), IRENA, BNEF, FCC, DOE, Epoch AI. Full sources on the Data page.
Each sector is built from primary sources — FRED, IRENA, FCC, DOE, Epoch AI, BloombergNEF — and weighted by its role in the modern technology economy. Every weight is justified in the methodology, and an equal-weighted variant is published alongside for robustness.
Cost per GFLOPS fell from ~$10,000 to under a cent. Storage went from $10,000/GB to $0.014/GB.
Long-distance calls went from $0.25/min to effectively free. Mobile data from $1,000/GB to $0.02/GB globally.
Solar: $20/watt to $0.20/watt. Batteries: $7,500/kWh to $115/kWh. LEDs produce the same light with a tenth of the electricity.
Lithium-ion battery costs fell 98% from 1991. Electric vehicles crossed price parity with ICE in China in 2024.
M2 at $3.3T. Dial-up modems. A GFLOP costs roughly $10,000. Solar power is a novelty.
Moore's Law in full stride. Broadband begins. M2 reaches $4.9T.
Solar falls below $2/watt. Lithium-ion packs drop 20%+ annually. LEDs reach scale. M2: $8.7T.
M2 expands 24% in one year — the largest peacetime expansion in history. Technology deflation keeps compounding.
DI at 3.74 (down 96% since 1990). M2 at $21.3T (up 550%). The gap is the index.
The weighted Deflation Index above is locked at year-end 2024 because two key sources — IRENA's renewable cost report and NREL's Annual Technology Baseline — only publish 2025 data in mid-2026. But several inputs are available now. They're shown here as a separate panel so the headline index stays clean.
Money kept expanding. Consumer prices rose modestly. Computing and battery costs kept compounding downward.
Why this isn't in the headline index yet: energy and transportation 2025 measurements depend on IRENA & NREL releases (~July 2026) and FCC broadband filings (late 2026). The full v4.0 recalculation lands then. Until then, see the v3.1 update plan for source-by-source status.
Economists, journalists, students, engineers, policy wonks, curious readers who keep bumping into the same strange observation: technology is the engine of abundance, but abundance hasn't arrived in most people's monthly budget. This is a reference to help think through that mismatch.
Everything here — the data, the methodology, the calculations — is open. Read it, argue with it, use it in your own work. If we got something wrong, the repo accepts pull requests.
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