[prichino]

The inflation has been tampered with quite a bit over the years. It's how you explain how the avg American is much poorer than his parents. I.e. in real terms, as in being able to buy: quality food, quality car, quality house (what? renting? no, not the same)

I like this website as it uses the older methodology which has been twice updated it seems: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

[gruez]

>quality car

Ironic considering that the reason cars have gotten more expensive was because their quality increased.

>quality house

They've gotten bigger over the decades, better equipped, and the monthly payments have actually gone down

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/03/what-if-housing-pri...

[deadbolt]

I won't disagree with you that cars have increased in quality, but I don't believe homes have.

Bigger isn't better. Better equipped? Sure, maybe.

When I look at the new homes under construction today (or over the past few decades), they're shit. They have more floor space, and that's about all.

[gruez]

>When I look at the new homes under construction today (or over the past few decades), they're shit.

Can you elaborate on this? How are they "shit"? Bad build quality? Tacky design?

[throw0101a]

I replied to your other comment about Shadowstats, but will basically repeat the post:

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 simply think it should be higher so they make it higher in an arbitrary fashion. They publish no methodology to recreate their number or say why the x they add was chosen.

If you look at the graph their number and the official BLS number is always different by the exact same amount. And has been for years.

Whereas if you want to examine what BLS is doing you can download code:

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

[sbelskie]

If those numbers were right coffee would be $25 a cup. I can understand thinking CPI understates things, but the math for average inflation of 6-10% for decades just doesn’t add up.

[gruez]

Not to mention that 6-10% inflation combined with 2-3% GDP growth would mean the economy is contracting by 3-5%.