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You shouldn't. Shadowstats is a crank website, praying on people are already convinced that everything is more expensive than according to official numbers. Th
by em500 6y ago
You shouldn't. Shadowstats is a crank website, praying on people are already convinced that everything is more expensive than according to official numbers. They're the economics equivalent of homeopathy, anti-vaxers, 5G radiation truthers and sellers of homebew crypto-algos. I.e., they have a nice business and a good susceptible audience, but they're not providing you the Secret Information that the Authorities don't want you to know.
- jjav 6y agoI don't know anything about Shadowstats, no opinion on that. But the fact that prices have risen far faster than the official inflation numbers suggest is a trivially confirmable fact. Just look at what you paid for things years ago and now, compute percentage increase.
- em500 6y agoThe fact that specific prices, or that prices in some spending categories have risen faster than the standard CPI is trivially conformable and trivially true. The contention that the general price level has increased faster than CPI is quite difficult to confirm or dispute. Even on an individual level, it's not easy at all to built an accurate price index. Not many people have complete and accurate records of all their expenditures even from just the current month. Close to zero have them for several years, let alone decades. So they usually go by memory and cherry picking.
- jjav 6y agoWhat is 'general price level', is there a formal definition for this? > increased faster than CPI is quite difficult to confirm or dispute There's nothing difficult about that. Take the cost of all necessites like utilities, food, clothing, transportation. Graph cost over time. Compute percentage change year to year. Observe that the increase is higher than officially reported inflation rate. None of these steps is difficult. > Close to zero have them for several years, let alone decades. So they usually go by memory and cherry picking. I have all my finances categorized in GNUCash back to the late 90s. Most of my friends seem to also have similar data, whether in quicken or elsewhere, so I doubt it's close to zero.
- nostrademons 6y agoYou don't save your credit card & bank statements for 7 years back like you're supposed to?
- em500 6y agoEven if you never spent any cash for 7 years, the full bank/cc records are insufficient to built a complete personal price index, because they don't list exactly what and how much you bought (unless you have some extraordinary bank/cc). Can reconstruct from your bank records how many kWh electricity, gallons of gas, pounds of potatoes, cups of coffee, Gb of data or hours of video you consumed in 2015?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rayiner 6y agoThe value of my house has barely changed in the four years since I bought it. Grocery costs haven’t gone up noticeably either. Or gas. Or car payments. I live an hour outside DC, but there’s not a tech or finance job for miles.