[clavicat]

Fuel would be hard to game. It’s just fuel. Other components are trickier to calculate, like aggregate food prices or things involving hedonic regression. If there is gaming, you’d have to look at the tricky parts.

[Robotbeat]

Well if you don’t think we’ve gamed fuel but do think we’ve gamed CPI significantly (ie several percentage points per year for decades), then we have made REMARKABLE progress in reducing fuel costs over the last 40 years, with fuel efficiency improvements on top of that.

[clavicat]

I don’t doubt that. Oil was expensive in the seventies for geopolitical reasons. Production has since become much more predictable and secure.

[midasuni]

Since 2010 the cost of bread and milk has increased below CPI, and in general food at home has been below inflation too