Gary,

Years ago I read a book that spoke to the insanity of economic aggregation. It described an early economist that was sure everything could be understood once we got all the numbers totaled up for every item. The book even showed logs where he was attempting to total everything up. It really illustrated the idiocy of aggregating a bunch of prices on goods. I think of that book every time I here anyone speaking of consumer goods price indexes.

I have searched for hours to try and find where I originally read that but just cannot find it.

This quote is interesting in that it does a good job of removing money as the only focus in the value equation.