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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.
So, here is a link to a prior conversation on the forum on this topic. To summarize: Hlynka proudly proclaimed that he KNEW inflation was higher than claimed because...
And I audited his claims thus:
And there was no counter argument, although he replied further down in the thread repeatedly pointing to stuff like rotisserie chickens getting smaller. ((I don't mean to pick on the departed, it's just a clear example of what I'm talking about))
And this is what frustrates me. People will offer examples of inflation, concretely, and then refuse to back up their claims with data. I realize I might have been unfair to you, personally, because I'm imputing a lot of that behavior to you even though you haven't personally demonstrated it. But a lot of these claims seem to follow the same pattern: someone says that inflation is really bad, and the statistics are fake, and then they'll make a claim like eggs are $11/doz and refuse to engage when I can literally link to eggs for less than half that.
There's a lot of problems with the structure of the CPI, but honestly a big part of what we need to talk about isn't inflation in the traditional sense, it's WeirdFlation. It's the feeling people get when a TV that used to cost $4,000 is $500, but a ranch house that used to cost $150k and sit on the market for weeks is priced at $450k and sells in a week with no inspection. When forklift operators are making more than court personnel or teachers. When the ratio of pounds of steak you could buy for the cost of a T shirt has changed radically. We attach status to consumption, so when the ordinal value of consumption changes it is confusing. Things that we perceived as our birthright are almost out of reach for the average worker, but things that were once out of reach are affordable for a few hours pay.
We're all going through our own version of Agatha Christie's statement that growing up, she never dreamed she would be rich enough to own a car, nor poor enough not to have servants.
Tell me, why am I supposed to relitigate a conversation Hlynka had?
As it turns out aquota and Nybbler provided an explanation that squares the circle. There were several years were inflation was pretty high, and conversations around it assume that wages will follow prices, so if the speed of the increase of prices drops to something manageable, the problem will solve itself. It turns out that this assumption is sometimes wrong, and people are now upset their wages never caught up, and prices never fell.
Or, you can keep telling me how the whole thing is somehow a partisan-bias-fueled psy-op, even though more than half of Democrats believe in it too.
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