Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by prichino 1858 days ago
Oh lookie, someone has been calculating the numbers using the old methodology. We are much poorer than we thought.

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

1 comments

> Oh lookie, someone has been calculating the numbers using the old methodology.

They have been doing no such thing. They have not put any effort into "calculating" anything. They simply take the official BLS and add a constant. They say so themselves:

> Responding to prior criticisms made by economist James Hamilton, John Williams explained in a private phone call that Shadowstats does not actually recalculate BLS data, rather, the Shadowstats CPI merely adds a constant to the officially reported numbers.[25]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowstats.com

The number at that site will always be higher than the BLS number because the people who run that site think it should be higher. They publish no methodology to recreate their number. Whereas if you want to look at what BLS is doing you can download code:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project

Also, the official Shadowstats.com report costs $175 today (2021-05-11). However:

> Shadowstats doesn’t come cheap: currently, an annual subscription costs $175.

> Six years ago, an annual subscription cost … $175.

* https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/another-alterna...

$175. Huh. Where's that inflation?