Comment by littlecranky67
3 hours ago
The basket is dogshit, but not for the reason you probably think. Our lives improved tremendously by technology: internet, smartphone, videogames, netflix & co, medical progress, online shopping of any goods you can possible imagine, ability to travel the world for cheap.
The problem with the CPI basket is, it needs to be constant of products to be comparable, so NO technological advancement is considered in that basket. Instead, they use the price of butter and tomatoes. Well, a fictious 1950s person wouldn't care that is can buy more butter or tomatoes than we can, but would want smartphone and a plane ticket to thailand.
Funny, for me it seems terrible exactly for the opposite reason. These kinds of baskets are too heavily weighted by things that go relatively down in costs like technology and airplane tickets.
The monetary reason is that the reason those things go down is because of technology advances and not because of changes in the value of the currency. Inflation should be about the currency, and less about what cool advances people are doing to make cheaper TVs and better websites
The practical reason is that if the basics like rent and food go up relative to wages, then a lot of people end up crushed by the basics alone and have no disposable income left for the cool stuff. The baskets are often too biased towards spending patterns of those who live the good life and for whom luxuries actually matter
> Our lives improved tremendously by technology
Aside from technological and scientific progress in the medical field, it's generally been shown that people's lives have gotten worse.
I'm sorry but videogames and Netflix have done exactly nothing for my quality of life. In fact, I wish there were less of both, and multiple other things you listed. I think we have a significantly different understanding of quality.
It is just an example, but you come to the base of my argument: CPI basket is an average - and you cannot use it to make statements about individuals. If Netflix is nothing to you, then look at houses: My granparents (born even after 1920s) had an outhouse. That means, every time you need to use the bathroom, you left your house through the garden - come wind and weather. That meant in the winter, you were walking through the snow and do your business in a small, smelly outhouse without no access to running water whatsover at sub-zero degrees. Yet there are people running around saying that our grandparents could afford houses, while we can't anymore.
The quality of the house your grandparents (for 1920 probably your grand-gran parents) is vastly different. Those houses cannot be compared at all, when I take my dump in the heated warmth in a nicely smelling place listening to some music over my airpods.
Getting offtopic... for my father growing up in the Netherlands, the early 50's was still as you describe: an outhouse with a bucket, no running water, an uninsulated house with a roof that let in snow; he caught every illness. They had electricity but no appliances (except a radio?). By the time he was 18, they had a heater, fridge, freezer, washing machine, he had a (rusty) Mercedes and they got a TV soon after. So progress has been very uneven and if you only go back 40 years goods are far more comparable.
You might as well complain about that the basket contains tomatoes because you don't like tomatoes.
It's a statistical tool concerning populations, not a sampling of what hacker news user cicko in their wisdom thinks increases quality of life.