5 ms·

Frankly, I haven't seen a single country where I spent any significant amount of time, where official inflation numbers were not seeing as a complete joke by th

Frankly, I haven't seen a single country where I spent any significant amount of time, where official inflation numbers were not seeing as a complete joke by the common folks. And my experience usually matched it. There's plenty of space to hide reality when building a price index. Price index do not capture the reality of most people cost of living. They don't capture the family that have to buy margarine instead of butter, because butter became too expensive, while margarine became cheaper, Weight both items as the same, and voilá! no inflation, increases in the price of butter were cancelled by cheaper margarine, fuck you if you prefer butter. We can also do the same with housing: Capture prices as the average of a basket of cities. In reality, some cities will have absurd price increases while others are in decadence. The average prices increase of a disputed locality like NYC metro area will probably be masked by the fact that houses in BeltRustAssEnd, MI are becoming increasingly cheap. But, for the real person, what the fuck matters if BeltRustAssEnd houses are cheap as bananas? Who can get a job there? And of course, a single number cannot capture the subtleties of reality like the fact that while it is great that 80" TVs are now so cheap that they can be bought by the commoner, this fact means fucking nothing if having a roof over your head in a place where you don't need to spend most of your live commuting is becoming increasingly too expensive for a lot of the same folks. Too bad the commoner is just a paycheck away from being in the streets as he cannot pay for a house! He now has a TV that not even Queen Elisabeth could have just a few years ago!

jahnu 1y ago
> Frankly, I haven't seen a single country where I spent any significant amount of time, where official inflation numbers were not seeing as a complete joke by the common folks. The public in general can be really bad at perceiving the truth. I might take note of people's feelings to go and recheck something but I would not trust peoples feelings with stuff like this to make any sort of conclusion. Verifiable metrics* are the only way to get any sort of objective handle on this. * Edit: I replied below that I should have said verifiable metrics and context with discussion. Verifiable metrics are necessary but not sufficient.
- ferguess_k 1y ago
  No. It's more like the elites don't GaF about the ordinary people, and then there is no trust between the two.
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    Fortunately (or unfortunately) the world is not nearly as nefarious or conspiratorial as people with shorter sticks tend to make it out to be.
    - ferguess_k 1y ago
      No, it is not. They simple don't care to cover up anymore so we don't need to invent tin hats anymore.
- elzbardico 1y ago
  Let's unpack this. The real, objective reality of people living their lives is not the Truth. But, instead a single index based on what is basically a bunch of arbitrary choices of a bunch of bureaucrats, subject to all kind of agendas and political/economical/social pressure, and based on an simulacrum of science that stands upon a bunch of questionable premises and unfalseable propositions is Truth. The pythagorean cult of number has been a disgrace for the human race.
  - jahnu 1y ago
    Yes, economic metrics can be reductive. E.g. believing GDP is a measure of well being is a common reductive mistake. However, the public are often wildly incorrect. I should have been more precise and said that in order to have a productive analysis and make good policy you need objective metrics and context with discussion.
  - vel0city 1y ago
    > The real, objective reality of people living their lives is not the Truth. People usually aren't objective though even when looking around at their own lives. When evaluating inflation in groceries they'll point to a few things that have had some pretty massive spikes (beef, eggs, soda) and ignore a lot of the other things in their shopping cart that hasn't had anywhere near as much inflation (grains, pastas, lunchmeats, pork, lots of vegetables, potatoes, lots of fresh fruit, etc). It can be pretty difficult for most people to actually be objective when looking at the world. Tons of people let emotions dominate what they see. I'm not arguing the BLS price index numbers are entirely perfect measures of reality, but the number of times I've had people tell me things like eating out is 10x more expensive than it was a few years ago is quite high. Is that an objective reality?
ferguess_k 1y ago
Yeah. Most people should build their own inflation index. It's not hard whence you realize the biggest expenditures are usually 1) mortgage/rent, and 2) food. I wouldn't be surprised that given the rate hiking in recent years going along with higher food price, some people see dramatic "inflation". Ofc one can always say that No this is not the academic way to define inflation, but who cares?
- mendelmaleh 1y ago
  In 2022 I scraped the current prices for things I bought on amazon the year before, and got a 7% increase. Unfortunately amazon stopped providing order reports recently... ``` $ inflation -y 2021 -f items.csv 86 successful items, 30 failed items 2256.76 total 2021 2427.62 total now +170.86 (+7%) difference ```
  - deeg 1y ago
    That's a pretty neat idea. Do the price aggregation sites (eg. camelcamecamel) do anything like that?
    - esafak 1y ago
      Providing financial reports could be a great sideline for them. Are you listening, Camel?!
lentil_soup 1y ago
sure, but are there any alternatives? To make data backed decisions you need to measure something, even if not perfect it gives you some sort of relative direction for the things measured. Not perfect but better than no data at all
Aloisius 1y ago
This is the the Producers Price Index. It tracks wholesale prices which are far less affected by locality. It also doesn't measure housing prices at all. The PPI is not a measure of consumer inflation. It's a leading indicator for it.
projectazorian 1y ago
> Price index do not capture the reality of most people cost of living. They don't capture the family that have to buy margarine instead of butter, because butter became too expensive, while margarine became cheaper, Weight both items as the same, and voilá! no inflation, increases in the price of butter were cancelled by cheaper margarine, fuck you if you prefer butter. I don't know how this works in other countries, but in the US the weights do not change month to month like this. If consumers keep making this choice over a period of years the index will eventually get reweighted, but reweighting only happens once every few years. (Of course, if you were an official put in charge specifically to cook the books you could just reweight on a monthly basis like you describe, which is something that might well happen now...)

jahnu 1y ago

> Frankly, I haven't seen a single country where I spent any significant amount of time, where official inflation numbers were not seeing as a complete joke by the common folks. The public in general can be really bad at perceiving the truth. I might take note of people's feelings to go and recheck something but I would not trust peoples feelings with stuff like this to make any sort of conclusion. Verifiable metrics* are the only way to get any sort of objective handle on this. * Edit: I replied below that I should have said verifiable metrics and context with discussion. Verifiable metrics are necessary but not sufficient.

ferguess_k 1y ago
No. It's more like the elites don't GaF about the ordinary people, and then there is no trust between the two.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  Fortunately (or unfortunately) the world is not nearly as nefarious or conspiratorial as people with shorter sticks tend to make it out to be.
  - ferguess_k 1y ago
    No, it is not. They simple don't care to cover up anymore so we don't need to invent tin hats anymore.
elzbardico 1y ago
Let's unpack this. The real, objective reality of people living their lives is not the Truth. But, instead a single index based on what is basically a bunch of arbitrary choices of a bunch of bureaucrats, subject to all kind of agendas and political/economical/social pressure, and based on an simulacrum of science that stands upon a bunch of questionable premises and unfalseable propositions is Truth. The pythagorean cult of number has been a disgrace for the human race.
- jahnu 1y ago
  Yes, economic metrics can be reductive. E.g. believing GDP is a measure of well being is a common reductive mistake. However, the public are often wildly incorrect. I should have been more precise and said that in order to have a productive analysis and make good policy you need objective metrics and context with discussion.
- vel0city 1y ago
  > The real, objective reality of people living their lives is not the Truth. People usually aren't objective though even when looking around at their own lives. When evaluating inflation in groceries they'll point to a few things that have had some pretty massive spikes (beef, eggs, soda) and ignore a lot of the other things in their shopping cart that hasn't had anywhere near as much inflation (grains, pastas, lunchmeats, pork, lots of vegetables, potatoes, lots of fresh fruit, etc). It can be pretty difficult for most people to actually be objective when looking at the world. Tons of people let emotions dominate what they see. I'm not arguing the BLS price index numbers are entirely perfect measures of reality, but the number of times I've had people tell me things like eating out is 10x more expensive than it was a few years ago is quite high. Is that an objective reality?

ferguess_k 1y ago

Yeah. Most people should build their own inflation index. It's not hard whence you realize the biggest expenditures are usually 1) mortgage/rent, and 2) food. I wouldn't be surprised that given the rate hiking in recent years going along with higher food price, some people see dramatic "inflation". Ofc one can always say that No this is not the academic way to define inflation, but who cares?

mendelmaleh 1y ago
In 2022 I scraped the current prices for things I bought on amazon the year before, and got a 7% increase. Unfortunately amazon stopped providing order reports recently... ``` $ inflation -y 2021 -f items.csv 86 successful items, 30 failed items 2256.76 total 2021 2427.62 total now +170.86 (+7%) difference ```
- deeg 1y ago
  That's a pretty neat idea. Do the price aggregation sites (eg. camelcamecamel) do anything like that?
  - esafak 1y ago
    Providing financial reports could be a great sideline for them. Are you listening, Camel?!

lentil_soup 1y ago

sure, but are there any alternatives? To make data backed decisions you need to measure something, even if not perfect it gives you some sort of relative direction for the things measured. Not perfect but better than no data at all

Aloisius 1y ago

This is the the Producers Price Index. It tracks wholesale prices which are far less affected by locality. It also doesn't measure housing prices at all. The PPI is not a measure of consumer inflation. It's a leading indicator for it.

projectazorian 1y ago

> Price index do not capture the reality of most people cost of living. They don't capture the family that have to buy margarine instead of butter, because butter became too expensive, while margarine became cheaper, Weight both items as the same, and voilá! no inflation, increases in the price of butter were cancelled by cheaper margarine, fuck you if you prefer butter. I don't know how this works in other countries, but in the US the weights do not change month to month like this. If consumers keep making this choice over a period of years the index will eventually get reweighted, but reweighting only happens once every few years. (Of course, if you were an official put in charge specifically to cook the books you could just reweight on a monthly basis like you describe, which is something that might well happen now...)