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> CPI is designed to make the government look good, hence the article. The CPI is run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: > The "food price index" evolved into
by throw0101c 3y ago
> CPI is designed to make the government look good, hence the article.
The CPI is run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
> The "food price index" evolved into what we now call the Consumer Price Index (CPI). During World War I, rapid increases in prices, particularly in shipbuilding centers, made a more comprehensive index essential for calculating cost-of-living adjustments in wages. Studies of family expenditures were conducted in 92 industrial centers in 1917–19 in order to provide appropriate weighting patterns for the index. Periodic collection of prices was started and, in 1919, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) began publication of separate consumer price indexes for 32 cities. Regular publication of a national index, the U.S. city average, began in 1921, and indexes were estimated back to 1913.
* https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi/history.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi/history.htm
It is one of most examined numbers in statistics, and while the "best" way† to do things is debated, are there any non-tin-foil hat people that think that the numbers are actually wrong given the published methodologies? Entire research projects (which have released source code) have examined the official numbers and found that they track things fairly well:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project
† Often no such thing exists, but rather trade-offs in various metrics.
- Phiwise_ 3y ago>> CPI is designed to make the government look good, hence the article. >The CPI is run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: ... https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi/history.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi/history.htm You do notice that your link to back up disagreeing with the assertion of potential government bias is to a .gov domain, surely?
- raincole 3y agoI really like how they put Labor in italics. As if that disputed the fact it's part of the government.
- tsimionescu 3y ago> are there any non-tin-foil hat people that think that the numbers are actually wrong given the published methodologies? No, but the whole point of the poster above, and of the article we're commenting on, is that the methodologies themselves are wrong (i.e. that they don't measure what people really care about, they measure something that the government thinks will look better than reality). This is a very common problem in economics: numbers agree very well with the models, but the models themselves are barely applicable to reality.