> Perhaps you mean that the weights follow a 2 year moving average? No, I mean what I said. The weights used for CPI calculations are updated every two years.

> Perhaps you mean that the weights follow a 2 year moving average? No, I mean what I said. The weights used for CPI calculations are updated every two years. In between they are constant. The BLS also updates weights more often based on estimates of consumer behavior (rather than surveys), which are used for C-CPI calculations. The published annual weights include these updated (estimated) weights for the inbetween years. > Your overall negative tone suggests you are emotionally invested in the CPI being correct, or perhaps just seeming smart. I'm more interested in the truth. I have fairly low tolerance for people who go around posting things like (1) Average price of gasoline adjusted for average price of gasoline (2) CPI weights are secret but it's widely believed (by who?) that gasoline is a huge factor, which the government uses to manipulate inflation numbers (3) The government is manipulating weights to smooth out the CPI It's fairly clear that you're well out of your depth on this material. > an index of raw commodities and business expenses should account for the rest of the index. This would no longer be a Consumer Price Index. There are other types of indices, such as the Producer Price Index (also produced by the BLS). > Collecting the data to calculate CPI the way I suggested is a difficult solo exercise. But if you are actually interested in an alternative estimation, start by looking at the growth of SMA(3) of GDP ^ (2/5) * M2 ^ (2/3). This is the baseline growth heuristic I have been using to consider one to be keeping up with inflation. Looking at money supply is pretty meaningless without also looking at velocity. M2 has been going up but the velocity has been going down [1]. Besides that, the exponents add to more than one, so even ignoring the extreme dubiousness of attributing GDP increases to inflation this is going to outpace (by an exponential factor) actual inflation under normal economic regimes. Back to this > Your overall negative tone suggests you are emotionally invested in the CPI being correct I can say almost the same from my point of view: you seem to be emotionally invested in CPI being flawed and/or manipulated in such a way as to intentionally underestimate true inflation. You've made a number of false or at best dubious claims in support of that position. I've tried to answer them even-handedly. > Further recommended reading: https://www.lynalden.com/inflation/ https://www.lynalden.com/inflation/ I think I'll stick with economists whose job is to understand inflation rather than an engineer dabbling in investment advising. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V