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A trim man with a strong tennis game and enough punchlines to charm any audience, Boskin makes friends easily. Washington insiders say he made enemies there too, but not as many as others. He went out of his way to socialize with people he disagreed with. There are very few academic economists who know as much or more than he does about the CPI, and even fewer who can deal effectively with questions from politicians, reporters or economists outside this specialty, said commission member Dale Jorgenson, chairman of Harvard's economics department. "A lot of my colleagues have spent a fair amount of time in Washington and they are not as attuned to this political role that he plays." Boskin translates back and forth between theorists and politicians, and he is persuasive, Jorgenson said. "Of course, he's gotten a lot of exposure from it, but he is also catching a lot of flak."

Boskin holds himself to high standards in almost everything he tackles. He taught a class in public finance last year, for example, that attracted 150 students. He had planned for 40. He wound up taking the students in small groups to the faculty club for lunch. He also spent finals week administering an oral test - students had to pretend they were a national policy adviser arguing a case to a Cabinet member.

Demonstrating some of his political skills on a recent day, Boskin juggled an interview with a reporter and incoming phone calls from Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the office of New Jersey Republican Gov. Christine Whitman, a staffer from the House Budget committee and Alan Greenspan's counterpart at the German Bundesbank, Hans Tietmeyer. Everybody wanted to talk about the commission's report.

Says John Shoven, dean of humanities and sciences: "When I first came to Stanford, it was known primarily as a great place for theoretical economics, partly because of geography." But Boskin is among a growing number of Stanford and Hoover economists who routinely hop planes to the capital, he said. Boskin's CPI work "is one of the most important public policy studies that economists have done this generation."

Janet Norwood, who headed the Bureau of Labor Statistics when Boskin was Bush's closest economic adviser, worries that the high profile Boskin has given the CPI could lead to the politicization of American statistics. But she praises Boskin for his "personal involvement and interest" in trying to get CPI problems fixed when he was part of the Bush administration.

The CPI report is like a snowball rolling downhill, gathering new questions, Boskin explained after Tietmeyer's call. At first foreign media treated it as a U.S. curiosity, but then they started to ask if the same statistical problems applied to their countries. Boskin believes that the general problem applies to all industrialized economies. "As people get richer, they consume more quality, greater convenience and variety, not just more of the same things," he says, and the current statistical systems are better at tracking quantity than quality.

Boskin draws on personal experience, not just statistics. The grandson of immigrants and son of a small Los Angeles contractor who dropped out of college during the Depression, Boskin is aware that he can afford central heating and air conditioning, whereas his grandfather stoked a wood- and coal-burning furnace and his parents "never dreamed of air conditioning," which is now in 75 percent of American homes. His wife, Boskin notes, "can keep track of her mother in San Diego while she is commuting to San Francisco. Her mother can always reach her because of cellular phones."

Both the strength and the weakness of the CPI, Boskin says, lies in its underlying simplicity. The fixed market basket, recalculated only once every decade, "becomes less and less representative over time as consumers respond to price changes and new choices." VCRs didn't enter it until 1987 - after half of Americans had bought one and the prices dropped 30 percent or more per year. Cellular phones, already purchased by 60 million Americans, won't make the CPI list until 1998. Many consumers also have switched to discount stores or to shopping on weekends - changes in habits that aren't reflected in the CPI's price quotes.

Changing from a fixed basket of goods and services to a cost-of-living index also involves acknowledging that consumers have many ways to avoid price increases. The CPI formula assumes that "when the price of Granny Smith apples goes up, you do not substitute [with] Delicious apples; when the price of hamburger goes up, you don't buy chicken parts or macaroni," Boskin says. "We are not saying [consumers] are not worse off if the price of something they buy goes up. They are. But they are not as badly off as if they were unable to substitute at all, which is what the current formulas estimate."

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has begun experimenting with a mathematical formula designed to estimate the substitution effect of items in the same category - one brand of apples for another but not macaroni for beef - and if satisfied with the results intends to incorporate it into the calculation of the index by 1999. The budget agreement worked out between congressional leaders and President Clinton last week assumes this will result in a downward adjustment of 0.15 percent.

More controversial are commission proposals that would take into account changes in a product's quality when adjusting the price that consumers pay. If a new model refrigerator costs more but is more durable, energy efficient or safer than the old one, the price increase should not be counted wholly as price inflation, the commission argues.

"Take automobiles," says Shoven. "Nobody bothers to check oil anymore because oil almost never leaks. Flat tires are almost a thing of the past. When I was growing up, my family took drives on Sundays up to the mountains, and I remember lots of cars on the side of the road with overheating problems." The government has modified its procedures in recent years to more accurately measure quality changes in cars, but the Boskin commission contends there is substantial overlooked quality in other products that evolve rapidly with new technology. Consumer electronics, such as televisions, and medical care top the list.

Statistical and theoretical breakthroughs, as well as scanner data from stores, make the task of measuring quality change easier now, even if the job is bigger, Boskin says.

But some critics say many quality comparisons can't be done objectively and negative changes in quality also need more emphasis. Bob Bosworth of the Brookings Institution, for example, thinks there is "an inherent set of problems of accurately measuring quality that at present lies beyond the capabilities of the science."

The critics are right to point out that the government cannot capture all quality changes immediately, Boskin says. Sales of fax machines and cellular phones, for example, took off faster than anyone expected because consumers discovered they increased their efficiency. The commission suggests two replacements for the CPI - a revised monthly index and a yearly index that can be adjusted as new information becomes available.

Boskin points to research being done by young economists like Mark McClellan, an assistant professor at Stanford, and a Harvard colleague. They analyzed data on all 200,000 elderly Americans who were treated for heart attacks between 1984 and 1991. While treatment costs increased 4 percent annually above general inflation, the costs were actually 2 percent below inflation, the said, when they accounted for quality change by putting a value on the length of patients' lives following treatment. SR