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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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"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.

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.

the economy is great for some Americans and terrible for others

This is the entire purpose of national economic statistics - to provide an overall average for the entire economy.