A research measure in development
What does it cost to live last year's life?
The Restoration Gap measures the change in the cheapest way to reproduce the consumption experience you actually had last year — the carry-on that used to board with you, the ad-free feed that used to be the price, the trash pickup that used to be the rent — and reports the difference against headline CPI.
Firms increasingly raise effective prices by unbundling included features into fees, moving the old standard behind a new premium tier, and redesigning menus so the cheapest option is a thinner one. A matched-specification index like CPI answers a different question — and when households cope by trading down, average-spending measures read their coping as savings. This project prices the experience instead: frozen at last year, restored at today's menu, line item by line item.
The idea in one example
Last year a standard Economy round trip cost $300 and a full-size carry-on boarded with you. This year the same $300 buys Basic Economy — personal item only — and the fare that still includes your bag is $385. The price of reproducing last year's trip rose 28.3%. A lowest-available-fare specification can read the same event as 0% — or, when the stripped fare launches below the old price, as a price decrease.
And the design cuts both ways, by rule: if Basic launches at $260 while old Economy still costs $300, the traveler who needs the carry-on sees exactly zero — more options are not inflation — and the traveler whose experience Basic actually matches sees a genuine price decrease. The measure moves only when the cost of getting an experience back moves, in either direction. When fees fall — as bank overdraft fees have — it prints negative.
What ships in every release
Sector Restoration Gaps
Per-sector spreads over the matching CPI series, decomposed into what-is-priced vs whose-basket effects.
The Inclusion Ledger
Every unbundling and tiering event as an auditable line item: what was included, what restoring it costs, via which route.
The Exclusion Register
The census of what we can't price and won't pretend to: silent quality loss, counted with the budget dollars it touches.
Composite Gap
The bottom-40%-weighted covered-sector composite, with the coverage share printed beside it.
What this is not
This is not a claim that CPI is wrong, and it is not a "true inflation" number. The Restoration Gap is, by construction, an upper bound on constant-experience cost growth for the covered sectors — it deliberately refuses substitution at the experience level, and it says so in every release. CPI and chained CPI answer a compensated, substitution-inclusive question; this measures the reproduction cost of a frozen experience. Both can be true. The gap between them is the information.
Method, formulas, bounds, and limitations: Methods. Positioning, roadmap, and the honest caveats: About.