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Well, I'll just say that if people see their bills go 3x you're going to have a hard time convincing them inflation is fine even if by some statistical vodoo you can get the numbers to show 3%.
Since I'm not American my only two options are to go with the official numbers or give some credence to other people's subjective reports. At the end of the day this is a purely intellectual exercise for me.
I think you're making a mistake by saying this is political. Haven't surveys been showing pretty handy majorities concerned about inflation?
What it amounts to is that we had some very shitty economic years, with year-over-year inflation hitting almost 9% in 2022. And an incomplete recovery. The economy isn't terrible now, it's merely mediocre, but people don't react only to the past year, particularly with inflation. And for unemployment, the trend is getting worse, which people also react to.
So the economy is not good now. Unemployment is getting worse; it's similar to the Trump years but trending the wrong direction. Inflation is higher than the Trump years, and price levels are enormously higher because of earlier high inflation. Real GDP growth seem OK, but real median wage growth (which is a lot closer to the individual) is lower than the Trump years. Sentiment is explainable by the numbers; you can slice and dice the numbers to make that look not true, but you have to know that's what you're doing.
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https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-ECONOMY/SENTIMENT-POLITICS/gkvlgqjzxpb/
Consumer sentiment being politically motivated is, itself, at this point a well measured statistic. ((Sorry for the awful graph but I think you can figure it out))
Maybe I'm mentally Ill, but that graph looks perfectly readable to me.
Anyway you'll notice that even in these polarized times, and with a metric as nebulous as "sentiment" you still get something coherent. The election times flips notwithstanding, the for each party, and the independents, are moving in the same direction at the same time. You don't get Democrats saying everything is getting better over the years as Republicans are saying everything is getting worse, nor do you get each side maxing out their respective values.
Inflation is no different. Yes, fewer Democrats think it's a problem than Republicans, but that still leaves us with 52% Democrats thinking it's a "very big" problem. Maybe they got psy-opped by TikTok, maybe 3% is already a very big problem for a lot of people... Or maybe, just maybe, the 3% number is not representative of the increases hitting people each month.
Listen I'll be the first one in line to say the CPI is fake and gay, a government chimera imagining what the average American needs to buy every month while ignoring the actual experience of oneself or one's friends trying to buy things.
But this is an area where we have a very clear partisan valence to interpretations of economic data. And repeatedly I've had the experience on this very forum of people making loud proclamations of how bad inflation is, with prices listed, that are literally false. My interlocutor will claim eggs are $11/doz, that gas prices are higher, that chicken is $8/lb. I don’t know how else to interpret that experience.
You'll have to point me to where I denied this is biased along partisan lines. I'm saying that even taking the bias into account, you'll still get results implying a number quite a bit larger than 3%.
But what does "a number higher than 3%" mean exactly? What is the number you're talking about? Do you think the basket of goods is poorly constructed, or that the numbers for the basket are faked?
CPI is an artificial concept, but that's because there is no natural concept to stand in for it.
Wish I knew, my bet is on the (possibly deliberately) poor construction of the basket, but I have no way of telling. I don't know the precise number either.
Look, the whole conversation started with KnotGodel saying inflation is not a big issue, because it's only 3%. When people dispute that he goes on his "actually it's perfectly consistent with the official data you're disputing" spiel. Well, if it's perfectly consistent with the data, and the majority of Americans are saying that it is indeed a very big problem, then all that means that either the 3% number is wrong, or that number actually means inflation is a big problem.
You brought political bias into the question. Fair enough - it exists but is not big enough to dismiss the concern. KnotGodel's original argument is still wrong. Unless people psyopped themselves into believing the prices are higher than they are.
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The reason I brought up national surveys (which I could be strong about! It's just one of those factoids that got absorbed into my head somehow) is that it le's us get past the bias of this forum, or even right-wingers more broadly. I suppose it's entirely possible people are irrationally taking out their life's frustrations on the consumer price index, but I hope you'll understand why some might be taken aback, given the sheer magnitude of the phenomenon you're proposing.
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I literally put the price tags on the shelf every week, and I strongly dislike being gaslit with the same tactics that were used for "it's just a stutter, you're a crazy conspiracy theorist"
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