Phrenology (see this amusing four-minute video), popular in the first half of the nineteenth century, was the study of skull shape and contours (believed to indicate the location of more- and less-developed areas of the brain) in order to discern individuals’ abilities and personality traits (called “faculties” in the phrenologists’ jargon). A clear map of the various skull sections and their corresponding faculties can be found in this excerpt from Samuel Wells’ version of the 1840 Fowler's Practical Phrenology: Giving a Concise Elementary View of Phrenology.

M. Henry Linder, Richard Peach, and Robert W. Rich

Among the measures of core inflation used to monitor the inflation outlook, the series excluding food and energy prices is probably the best known and most closely followed by policymakers and the public. While the conventional “ex food and energy” measure is a composite of the price changes of a large number of different products and services, almost all models developed to explain and forecast its behavior do not distinguish between the goods and services categories. Is the distinction important? Here, we highlight the different behavior and determinants of goods inflation and services inflation and suggest, based on preliminary analysis, that we can improve the forecast accuracy of this conventional core inflation measure by combining separate inflation forecasts of the two categories.