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Isn’t boring and dull bureaucratic number crunching the opposite of “made up”? I wouldn’t want these numbers influenced by someone putting their finger on the scale because they know better than the data. I’m sure it happens anyways, but I don’t see how your argument justifies what you’re claiming.
"Bureaucratic" doesn't mean consistent and stable, it means arbitrary and unimaginative. You need to calculate how much inflation went up last year. The price of a Honda Civic went up $1000. The price of a Chevy went up $2000. Are those cars in the same categories, or different categories? Do we average them? Then it turns out that although the Civic went up $1000, they added new airbags that promise to save lives. How much is that worth? Let's make up a number. The cost went up by X but the value went up by Y so really that price increase doesn't represent $1,500 of inflation but etc. etc. etc. The economy is endlessly complex, and the measures aren't. So they're very somewhat arbitrary. It's drawing in freehand.
It's not even about, say, a conspiracy to make the numbers look good for someone or some purpose. (Although that happens: Boss wants evidence that raising interest rates is good so let's give it to him. I remember this famously happening in how CBO came up with estimates for Obamacare's impact on the federal deficit.) But it's not really a conspiracy. It's garbage in garbage out. You would expect this to fall apart for complicated situations, such as what we have right now: the economy is great for some Americans and terrible for others.
You don't need to posit invented scenarios like this, you can just go and check what they change.
For instance, in the UK they publish the change in CPI weights every year, which can be found here https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/datasets/consumerpriceinflationupdatingweightsannexatablesw1tow3.
The changes are seriously miniscule, with one or two exceptions due to the recovery of things like pubs and restaurants post-covid, but even these changes are not large.
What's particularly notable is that the Eurozone, US and UK all had extremely similar patterns of inflation since 2010, even in periods where it wasn't a notable partisan issue. Presumably all the administrators in each of these countries or blocs cannot have had identical internal or political incentives across time, nor does it seem likely they mere happen to have made identical mistakes in the exact same sequence. The only answer is that they are broadly measuring something real across the global economy in at least a relatively accurate way. No doubt disputes and decisions over changing weights can impact figures at the margin, but the overall pattern is generally going to be reliable.
This is the entire purpose of national economic statistics - to provide an overall average for the entire economy.
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The figure that I'm most interested in would be something like, "What is the least amount of money someone needs to live a respectable life this year?" Something like the poverty line, except instead of just looking at basic needs it looks at how much someone would need to spend to live according to the regulations and societal expectations we are subject to. This number would be widely different between someone who bought their house before 2010 vs someone who is renting or bought a house more recently. There are a few categories that could be evaluated separately, like lifestyle to be a respectable DINK in a big city, lifestyle to be a family of four in a suburb, etc. The interesting thing would be to pick a lifestyle and stick with it for a decade, seeing what the minimum amount a family could spend to stay in that lifestyle over time. That is what people think inflation is tracking, or wish inflation was tracking, based on how people reference inflation in arguments.
Someone has been tracking "Average Household Expenditures" which seems like an ok, if imperfect proxy for what I have in mind. https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables/top-line-means.htm.
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No, it means that they are "made up" out of the distortions and idiosyncracies of a horribly-kludged procedure on its 44th revision from an original 1987 typewritten spiral-bound handbook, which has been subject to a constant distortionary tug-of-war to drag it closer to the political expediency of the day, or the latest appointee's personal policy judgment.
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