[antisthenes]

I've come to consider the official inflation figures as absolute nonsense. It's a shame, really, because the BLS does a lot of good work, and outdated metric calculation methods really put a tarnish on an otherwise great agency. I'm not sure how much of that is being held hostage to political goals.

Things that are in actual demand [1], like health care, education and housing (in desirable areas) have absolutely been outpacing inflation.

Sure, if you measure the absolute basics needed to not die in a society, the figures might make sense (as it would be mostly food and clothing, both of which are dirt cheap. So cheap in fact that most of the time they can be had for free! Thrift stores and food banks are your friend)

But if we're talking about a thriving society and population, surely our aims should be set higher than the very first step on Maslow's hierarchy of needs?

[1](it's not Smart TVs and Smartphones, although even flagship smartphones have recently ballooned in price far outstripping any sort of inflation figures)

[derg]

> But if we're talking about a thriving society and population, surely our aims should be set higher than the very first step on Maslow's hierarchy of needs?

Very much agreed.

The issues with sectors that have been outpacing inflation aren't due to a blanket "we're pumping too much fiat into the economy" but are absolutely political choices.

Healthcare: The US does spend too much here for what we get in return but this is a political choice. We could institute Medicare for All and _save_ money [0]

Education: Again political here. How much funding has been stripped at the state/local level for the universities and how much can be attributed to extremely bloated administrations? Other countries can manage education just fine.

Housing: this is current housing being weaponized to increase the value of property while artificially limiting what, where, when, who, and how much can be built at any given time. See: all of California. Housing as strictly a monetary investment now dictates that nothing is ever allowed to depreciate, only ever increase.

[0]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[secabeen]

> Healthcare: The US does spend too much here for what we get in return but this is a political choice. We could institute Medicare for All and _save_ money.

This is absolutely true, but also exceptionally hard. Extracting the $1 Trillion/yr out of the current healthcare system is going to put a lot of people out of work. We'll need a good system to re-train them for new work too.

[erentz]

The change from CPI to “Chained CPI” back in the 90s (?) has been a bit of a con IMO. It was designed to reduce the amount of inflation reported. Making it the official inflation metric used for social security meant that SS cost of living adjustments went down screwing people on social security (that they had already paid for). It also then started to get used later on to set the tax brackets. Which again screws people by slowly pushing them into higher tax brackets.

I prefer the older CPI system. It’s still imperfect but it was fairer.

[ytpete]

Surely there must be some price index that uses a basket including these additional important "goods"... does anybody know of one?

I think items like housing and transportation costs are used by some regions when calculating the cost of living that determines the "poverty line" for aid programs. So there's probably already a well-vetted process for looking up some of those price points. Then it's just a matter of aggregating them and tracking that value over time...