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Thanks to NPR for this important reporting; it sucks that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down after losing all of its funding. This "baske

Thanks to NPR for this important reporting; it sucks that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down after losing all of its funding. This "basked of goods" approach to understanding price inflation seems outdated to me. 114 items! It seems to me like there must be organizations out there with tons and tons of price and consumer spending data for thousands and thousands of items, right? It should be possible to get much more comprehensive measurement of price changes over time vs and approach taken like this one (or the CPI, for that matter).

bpt3 9mo ago
1. It sounds like you're just describing a larger "basket of goods"? That data is available, but also valuable, and I'm not sure why the basket of goods tracked by the CPI or NPR would be inadequate. 2. This specific exercise is designed to be relatable to individuals (in general, and specifically ones such as the people interviewed in the article who claimed that their grocery bill went up about 50% in a year, which is implausible to put it politely) so that they can understand the actual level of inflation rather than the one they imagined in their head.
darth_avocado 9mo ago
I’ve had a gripe with “basket of goods” approach. Does a household really care that much if the game of clue is 10% cheaper in 2025? There needs to be an index that reflects what people really need and the closest I’ve found is the ALICE index: https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index
- eszed 9mo ago
  I did not know about this, and it's excellent. Seems like a one-shot explanation for the "vibe-flation" phenomenon that many people find mystifying.
- bpt3 9mo ago
  Most households are able to afford more than the essentials and do care about the cost of entertainment. There's value in the index you described as well, but IMO it doesn't make sense to use it as the basis for the overall economy.
  - turtletontine 9mo ago
    Thinking about the “overall economy” increasingly means focusing on the spending of the rich, and ignoring the poor and struggling. A consequence of increasing inequality is the rich make up more and more consumer spending. Consumer spending can therefore easily look great while most people are struggling to get by. There really is no “overall economy”, there are many many different stories happening all at once, and focusing on simple metrics lets you easily fool yourself.
    - wasabi991011 9mo ago
      > Thinking about the “overall economy” increasingly means focusing on the spending of the rich, and ignoring the poor and struggling. A consequence of increasing inequality is the rich make up more and more consumer spending. It means increasingly focusing on the spending of the rich, because the population is increasingly richer. Proportion of families making more that 150k (in 2024 dollars) has gone from 5% in 1967 to 33% in 2024, while both middle class (50k-150k) and poor (<50k) have decreased. [1] [1] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dtoi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fafc69dd4-34a2-423d-87dd-0a509135adf6_1416x1028.webp https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dtoi!,f_auto,q_auto:...
      - turtletontine 9mo ago
        Great example. The population as a whole is richer like you say, and also the richest 10% account for half of consumer spending, compared to 36% 30 years ago. [1] So yes, consuming spending has become more of a metric of the wealthy’s spending habits. No single metric tells the whole story, and by taking them in isolation it’s quite easy to lose the forest for the trees. [1] https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-rich-spending-2c34a571 https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
  - darth_avocado 9mo ago
    > Most households are able to afford more than the essentials and do care about the cost of entertainment. 1/3 of the households make less than $50k. Mean survival budget is $35k-40k. After taxes, if a third of the population can barely meet a survival budget, an index like this needs to be part of the overall economy. And the point of the ALICE index is exactly to address what you are pointing out. When wages, social security etc. were increasing proportionally to the essential goods, it made sense to have the CPI include other goods and services, allowing policy makers to use it as a basis for policy directions. However, when essentials become expensive faster than non essentials, it creates a problem for policy makers. It explains the “vibeflation” where policy makers were pushing back hard on economic struggles that most people are feeling by pointing to CPI numbers that show a 2-3% inflation, meanwhile people are struggling and dipping into savings to make things work. We need to have both.
- boplicity 9mo ago
  Toys for kids are absolutely a necessity in most households with kids.
  - darth_avocado 9mo ago
    Only when you can afford them.
  - baobabKoodaa 9mo ago
    Why does your child need 34 or 35 toys? She can be happy with just one or two toys.
    - queuebert 9mo ago
      "Back in my day, we had a cardboard box and a stick and didn't complain ..."
      - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
        Now you'd get CPS called for the stick. Mostly sarcastic, but I don't think it's a hot take to realize that the curtain has shifted substantially over the decades in terms of how to raise a child.
    - dpark 9mo ago
      “Why don’t you just live like you’re destitute? So ungrateful?!” How many toys do you have?
      - olyjohn 9mo ago
        So many that I can't play with all of them, most of them are broken, and I don't have time to fix them, so I get really depressed because they aren't usable when I want to play with them. Now I'm trying to get rid of most of them.
  - barbazoo 9mo ago
    People could save so much money if they bought used instead of new more often, especially toys. It's crazy how much garbage we produce basically just because we literally don't share our toys.
- naet 9mo ago
  I think the ALICE index is great for tracking pure essentials and survivability, which is definitely important, but it's also not unreasonable to track things that aren't 100% essential. My household does care if basic games and toys are cheaper or more expensive; we have kids and want to get some amount of stuff for them. If the price changes we will get more or less of those things since our budget for them is limited. I probably won't fall into abject poverty if some non essential things go up in price, but I also will be buying less which has both personal and broader economic impacts.
  - darth_avocado 9mo ago
    Absolutely. You need both. The point I’m trying to make is that we only have CPI which drives most policy decisions. However when you need about $40k to just survive and 1/3 of the households make less than $50k before taxes, you also need something like this to make effective policy decisions. Social security payments are a great example. If you adjust them only based on CPI, and essentials get more expensive at a higher rate than non essentials, you create a system where over a period of time, social security payments would barely cover the essentials.
  - cudgy 9mo ago
    More games and toys. That’s what kids need?
- throw0101d 9mo ago
  > I’ve had a gripe with “basket of goods” approach. Does a household really care that much if the game of clue is 10% cheaper in 2025? The game of Clue, and other games/toys, are in basket of goods because on average Americans spend some portion of their income per surveys: * https://www.bls.gov/respondents/cpi/ https://www.bls.gov/respondents/cpi/ The CPI published (and in headlines) isn't about your personal spending, but the spending on average spread over millions of people/households. The CPI is a model of reality, and so pointing to a particular instantiation of consumer will not match exactly: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
- joshuamorton 9mo ago
  This isn't really indexing in the same way that the CPI is indexing. Alice pulls medians from other surveys (so it uses what I assume to be CPI food and CPI housing data, though they may also use other things), and then includes childcare and healthcare costs with some (imo) pretty painful assumptions, and then tacks on a random 10% "misc" category. It does a good job of creating a very high estimate of costs. As one example, I looked at the housing cost for an suburb I'm familiar with, and it lists the housing cost for a single individual as nearly $1800, you can pretty easily find 1BR apartments for 1-1.2K in that area, and utilities aren't going to run $600/mo, and you can pretty easily go cheaper. And then again after doing that it tacks on a "misc" 10% budget item. I wouldn't call it a good estimate of "what people really need" and also it consumes the basket of goods, it doesn't compare to it.
- kjshsh123 9mo ago
  The CPI components are individually tracked and weighting is public. You can just play with the weights.
tclancy 9mo ago
The Economist tried to solve this in the past with https://www.economist.com/interactive/big-mac-index https://www.economist.com/interactive/big-mac-index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index for non-subscribers)
- tracker1 9mo ago
  I often toyed with the thought of a TP index... literally the spend on something you use to wipe crap off your rear and throw away.
  - autoexec 9mo ago
    Short of unrolling it all and weighing it by the pound the math involved in the cost of TP is complicated. That said, McDonald's use of discriminatory/surge pricing complicates the actual cost of a big mac too.
    - tracker1 9mo ago
      Even by the pound would be hard... quality two-ply vs low-grade gas station TP... The price per unit is also difficult to compare... are you getting the costco packs that still have the larger per-sheet area or the new, smaller sheets. Not to mention, in general it might be a counter-intuitive index... If the spend per person on TP on average goes down, is that an uptake in bidets, lowered tp costs, or economic affects and people choosing cheaper options? That said, I still think it could be a "fun" index to track over time.
hoofhearted 9mo ago
https://www.spins.com/ https://www.spins.com/
queuebert 9mo ago
Credit card companies have all of this data. They could track classes of spending and regress out rising incomes, age, etc.
- matt-attack 9mo ago
  I’m just how exactly does my credit card company know how much I paid for shampoo?
  - brewdad 9mo ago
    Your retailer knows exactly how much you paid for shampoo. In most cases, they know it was exactly you who bought it. Data sharing agreements through direct or third parties complete the picture for both sides, retailer and card issuer.
topspin 9mo ago
> Thanks to NPR for this important reporting It's fascinating to see such work. By the grace of NPR, apparently the "transient inflation" narrative is officially inoperative, and plebian concerns about the price of eggs are now worthy! Will wonders never cease?

bpt3 9mo ago

1. It sounds like you're just describing a larger "basket of goods"? That data is available, but also valuable, and I'm not sure why the basket of goods tracked by the CPI or NPR would be inadequate. 2. This specific exercise is designed to be relatable to individuals (in general, and specifically ones such as the people interviewed in the article who claimed that their grocery bill went up about 50% in a year, which is implausible to put it politely) so that they can understand the actual level of inflation rather than the one they imagined in their head.

darth_avocado 9mo ago

I’ve had a gripe with “basket of goods” approach. Does a household really care that much if the game of clue is 10% cheaper in 2025? There needs to be an index that reflects what people really need and the closest I’ve found is the ALICE index: https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index

eszed 9mo ago
I did not know about this, and it's excellent. Seems like a one-shot explanation for the "vibe-flation" phenomenon that many people find mystifying.
bpt3 9mo ago
Most households are able to afford more than the essentials and do care about the cost of entertainment. There's value in the index you described as well, but IMO it doesn't make sense to use it as the basis for the overall economy.
- turtletontine 9mo ago
  Thinking about the “overall economy” increasingly means focusing on the spending of the rich, and ignoring the poor and struggling. A consequence of increasing inequality is the rich make up more and more consumer spending. Consumer spending can therefore easily look great while most people are struggling to get by. There really is no “overall economy”, there are many many different stories happening all at once, and focusing on simple metrics lets you easily fool yourself.
  - wasabi991011 9mo ago
    > Thinking about the “overall economy” increasingly means focusing on the spending of the rich, and ignoring the poor and struggling. A consequence of increasing inequality is the rich make up more and more consumer spending. It means increasingly focusing on the spending of the rich, because the population is increasingly richer. Proportion of families making more that 150k (in 2024 dollars) has gone from 5% in 1967 to 33% in 2024, while both middle class (50k-150k) and poor (<50k) have decreased. [1] [1] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dtoi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fafc69dd4-34a2-423d-87dd-0a509135adf6_1416x1028.webp https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dtoi!,f_auto,q_auto:...
    - turtletontine 9mo ago
      Great example. The population as a whole is richer like you say, and also the richest 10% account for half of consumer spending, compared to 36% 30 years ago. [1] So yes, consuming spending has become more of a metric of the wealthy’s spending habits. No single metric tells the whole story, and by taking them in isolation it’s quite easy to lose the forest for the trees. [1] https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-rich-spending-2c34a571 https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
- darth_avocado 9mo ago
  > Most households are able to afford more than the essentials and do care about the cost of entertainment. 1/3 of the households make less than $50k. Mean survival budget is $35k-40k. After taxes, if a third of the population can barely meet a survival budget, an index like this needs to be part of the overall economy. And the point of the ALICE index is exactly to address what you are pointing out. When wages, social security etc. were increasing proportionally to the essential goods, it made sense to have the CPI include other goods and services, allowing policy makers to use it as a basis for policy directions. However, when essentials become expensive faster than non essentials, it creates a problem for policy makers. It explains the “vibeflation” where policy makers were pushing back hard on economic struggles that most people are feeling by pointing to CPI numbers that show a 2-3% inflation, meanwhile people are struggling and dipping into savings to make things work. We need to have both.
boplicity 9mo ago
Toys for kids are absolutely a necessity in most households with kids.
- darth_avocado 9mo ago
  Only when you can afford them.
- baobabKoodaa 9mo ago
  Why does your child need 34 or 35 toys? She can be happy with just one or two toys.
  - queuebert 9mo ago
    "Back in my day, we had a cardboard box and a stick and didn't complain ..."
    - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
      Now you'd get CPS called for the stick. Mostly sarcastic, but I don't think it's a hot take to realize that the curtain has shifted substantially over the decades in terms of how to raise a child.
  - dpark 9mo ago
    “Why don’t you just live like you’re destitute? So ungrateful?!” How many toys do you have?
    - olyjohn 9mo ago
      So many that I can't play with all of them, most of them are broken, and I don't have time to fix them, so I get really depressed because they aren't usable when I want to play with them. Now I'm trying to get rid of most of them.
- barbazoo 9mo ago
  People could save so much money if they bought used instead of new more often, especially toys. It's crazy how much garbage we produce basically just because we literally don't share our toys.
naet 9mo ago
I think the ALICE index is great for tracking pure essentials and survivability, which is definitely important, but it's also not unreasonable to track things that aren't 100% essential. My household does care if basic games and toys are cheaper or more expensive; we have kids and want to get some amount of stuff for them. If the price changes we will get more or less of those things since our budget for them is limited. I probably won't fall into abject poverty if some non essential things go up in price, but I also will be buying less which has both personal and broader economic impacts.
- darth_avocado 9mo ago
  Absolutely. You need both. The point I’m trying to make is that we only have CPI which drives most policy decisions. However when you need about $40k to just survive and 1/3 of the households make less than $50k before taxes, you also need something like this to make effective policy decisions. Social security payments are a great example. If you adjust them only based on CPI, and essentials get more expensive at a higher rate than non essentials, you create a system where over a period of time, social security payments would barely cover the essentials.
- cudgy 9mo ago
  More games and toys. That’s what kids need?
throw0101d 9mo ago
> I’ve had a gripe with “basket of goods” approach. Does a household really care that much if the game of clue is 10% cheaper in 2025? The game of Clue, and other games/toys, are in basket of goods because on average Americans spend some portion of their income per surveys: * https://www.bls.gov/respondents/cpi/ https://www.bls.gov/respondents/cpi/ The CPI published (and in headlines) isn't about your personal spending, but the spending on average spread over millions of people/households. The CPI is a model of reality, and so pointing to a particular instantiation of consumer will not match exactly: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
joshuamorton 9mo ago
This isn't really indexing in the same way that the CPI is indexing. Alice pulls medians from other surveys (so it uses what I assume to be CPI food and CPI housing data, though they may also use other things), and then includes childcare and healthcare costs with some (imo) pretty painful assumptions, and then tacks on a random 10% "misc" category. It does a good job of creating a very high estimate of costs. As one example, I looked at the housing cost for an suburb I'm familiar with, and it lists the housing cost for a single individual as nearly $1800, you can pretty easily find 1BR apartments for 1-1.2K in that area, and utilities aren't going to run $600/mo, and you can pretty easily go cheaper. And then again after doing that it tacks on a "misc" 10% budget item. I wouldn't call it a good estimate of "what people really need" and also it consumes the basket of goods, it doesn't compare to it.
kjshsh123 9mo ago
The CPI components are individually tracked and weighting is public. You can just play with the weights.

tclancy 9mo ago

The Economist tried to solve this in the past with https://www.economist.com/interactive/big-mac-index https://www.economist.com/interactive/big-mac-index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index for non-subscribers)

tracker1 9mo ago
I often toyed with the thought of a TP index... literally the spend on something you use to wipe crap off your rear and throw away.
- autoexec 9mo ago
  Short of unrolling it all and weighing it by the pound the math involved in the cost of TP is complicated. That said, McDonald's use of discriminatory/surge pricing complicates the actual cost of a big mac too.
  - tracker1 9mo ago
    Even by the pound would be hard... quality two-ply vs low-grade gas station TP... The price per unit is also difficult to compare... are you getting the costco packs that still have the larger per-sheet area or the new, smaller sheets. Not to mention, in general it might be a counter-intuitive index... If the spend per person on TP on average goes down, is that an uptake in bidets, lowered tp costs, or economic affects and people choosing cheaper options? That said, I still think it could be a "fun" index to track over time.

hoofhearted 9mo ago

https://www.spins.com/ https://www.spins.com/

queuebert 9mo ago

Credit card companies have all of this data. They could track classes of spending and regress out rising incomes, age, etc.

matt-attack 9mo ago
I’m just how exactly does my credit card company know how much I paid for shampoo?
- brewdad 9mo ago
  Your retailer knows exactly how much you paid for shampoo. In most cases, they know it was exactly you who bought it. Data sharing agreements through direct or third parties complete the picture for both sides, retailer and card issuer.

topspin 9mo ago

> Thanks to NPR for this important reporting It's fascinating to see such work. By the grace of NPR, apparently the "transient inflation" narrative is officially inoperative, and plebian concerns about the price of eggs are now worthy! Will wonders never cease?