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The CPI includes shelter, food, energy, transport, education, medical care, clothing, recreation, and others, with weights that by and large make sense to me: h

• novok 6y ago
  People constantly cite that CPI excludes things like housing costs, or if we probably dug into it more excludes stuff in strange ways. It's also probably a global thing, some countries do exclude it completely, others do not so it can confuse things: Ex: https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2017/04/excluding-housing-cpi-massively-understated/ https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2017/04/excluding-housing-c... http://www.chapwoodindex.org/ http://www.chapwoodindex.org/
  • jfengel 6y ago
    The CPI does include housing. And my citation for that is the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose job is to put it together. Here is the document with excruciating detail: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2020.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2020.htm Housing is 42.385%, of which the shelter itself is 33.316%. The rest includes things like "Clocks, lamps, and decorator items" at 0.313%. That's American data. Maybe the Australian data (your first link) really does exclude it, but the US most certainly does not. If people think that the basket of goods is skewed, they need to justify that by comparing it against this list. The BLS makes a ton of data available, and it's unreasonable to claim otherwise.