Comment by Avicebron
9 hours ago
Yup. The St. Louis Fed is a joke. Inflation of owners' equivalent rent alone blows the whole argument up..
9 hours ago
Yup. The St. Louis Fed is a joke. Inflation of owners' equivalent rent alone blows the whole argument up..
I love that any time there’s a discussion about inflation, someone posts that link.
“If you would please look at the chart…” when it is known that inflation is a politically-charged figure that is indirectly manipulated to show much lower figures than the price increases the average person with average expenses (rent, car, fuel, food, etc.) experiences.
Let alone doing comparison of inflation over longer timespans. Garbage model in, garbage numbers out.
It is not necessarily politically influence. You simply cannot measure inflation properly. See my siblin comment about technology - it is just impossible to compare the life of a 1920s person to a 2020s person based on tomatos, butter and rent. Because the access to products that didn't exist at the given quality level in 2020 is impossible to price in.
You can think of it with a thought experiment: A smartphone (with hypothetical internet) in 1920 would be worth almost all the money in the world. If you simply had one smartphone in 1920, the richest billionares would offer most of their wealth to have one. Hence in 1920, a smartphone would be worth at least $10M in todays money. Yet you can buy one for $500 today - so you are twenty-thousand times richer than 1920. The same applies for flatscreen TVs, antibiotics (really valueable when you need it), polio vacination etc.
You can't measure this with CPI, yet people complain about the CPI is fake. It is just a statistical average, no more no less. It always was irrelevant. It is the arguments people do with that number, that are bullshit. Basic statistics teach you never use an average to come to conclusions about the individual.