> You can check which prices they are looking at. How could it be a lie?
By excluding prices which make the number look bad despite them potentially being the numbers regular people actually care about. The same is true of including prices which look good but don’t matter as much.
And then by marketing that average number as a realistic approximation of price increases in day to day life.
Inflation is the change in the price level. The price level is not observable, so it needs to be estimated somehow. Inferring it from the prices "people care about" is ABSOLUTELY WRONG methodologically speaking.
Who markets the number like that??? This is a way to communicate inflation to people. The context is the previous reports. If you change the methodology that context is garbage.
By excluding prices which make the number look bad despite them potentially being the numbers regular people actually care about. The same is true of including prices which look good but don’t matter as much.
And then by marketing that average number as a realistic approximation of price increases in day to day life.