In “The Number,” John Lanchester examines the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a critical economic measurement that affects countless aspects of life in the US. The essay opens with a series of seemingly disconnected facts about various topics before revealing that the central character of the essay is not a person but a number—the CPI. Lanchester explains that the CPI functions as more than just an economic indicator; it is a cornerstone of US governance and democratic principles. The statistic directly influences social security payments, food assistance programs, tax brackets, business contracts, court orders, and millions of workers’ salaries. Despite its importance, most people only notice the CPI when inflation becomes problematic, making it an invisible but powerful force in everyday life.

The essay details the extensive process behind calculating the CPI. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) collects data on thousands of items across the country, from specific types of cheese to recreational equipment, housing costs, and healthcare expenses. Lanchester illustrates how this massive undertaking transforms millions of data points into a single number that aims to represent the average change in consumer prices nationwide. The author acknowledges the inherent limitations of such a project—creating a universal metric for a diverse population of 340 million people—while emphasizing its necessity for a functioning society.

Lanchester connects the CPI to broader historical and philosophical contexts. He positions government statistics as essential components of the Enlightenment project that founded America, linking empirical data collection to democratic principles. The Constitution itself mandates counting through the Enumeration Clause, establishing statistical measurement as fundamental to US governance. Throughout history, the CPI has been contested and refined, evolving to address concerns about accuracy and representation.

The essay explores how inflation impacts different segments of society unequally. Lanchester notes that lower-income citizens experience inflation more severely since they spend larger proportions of their income on necessities like food and fuel—items particularly susceptible to price fluctuations. He discusses how the BLS attempts to account for these disparities through specialized indices like the CPI-E (Elderly) for older citizens and the Chained CPI, highlighting the ongoing effort to make economic statistics more representative.

Lanchester examines the political dimensions of inflation, introducing the “misery index” (unemployment rate plus inflation) as a predictor of presidential election outcomes. Historically, presidents facing double-digit misery index figures during election years have lost; Ronald Reagan was the sole exception. Lanchester points out that despite a relatively low misery index of 7.2 in 2024 (indicating economic improvement), public perception remained negative; this disconnect between statistical reality and public sentiment forms a central tension in the essay.

The author analyzes why citizens feel economically distressed despite improving economic indicators. He suggests several factors: The public has forgotten what high inflation feels like after decades of relative stability; people confuse falling inflation rates with falling prices; and food inflation—though only 8% of the CPI—has an outsized psychological impact because consumers encounter it multiple times daily. Additionally, Lanchester identifies how political forces have weaponized economic anxiety, promoting distrust in government statistics by claiming that the CPI is manipulated or fraudulent.

Lanchester concludes with a warning about abandoning the Enlightenment values embedded in statistical measurement. He references Carl Sagan’s prediction about the US sliding into superstition and celebrates the imperfect but necessary project of creating objective measures like the CPI. The essay ends by framing the rejection of such statistics as part of a dangerous cultural shift that Lanchester terms “the Darkening”—an anti-intellectual movement that privileges personal feeling over collective knowledge and threatens democratic governance.