[spaceman_2020]

This is why I think CPI numbers are all hogwash

All the younger people I know in less than stellar jobs are really hurting. These people were never well off but were comfortable before the pandemic.

But now they’re making hard decisions for basic necessities and grinding down the quality of their lives.

[esoterica]

The lowest income workers have seen the largest wage gains over the course of the pandemic.

[ses1984]

But the lowest income workers are also hit hardest by rising costs.

[itsdrewmiller]

I suspect the person you’re responding to is not really talking about truly low paying jobs - more likely entry level out of college jobs. (Not that I expect those are in aggregate underwater either.)

[AtlasBarfed]

I remember from even better days than today, but the entry job out of college had become an unpaid internship.

Which effectively limited them to people that already had very stable and financially supportive family situations.

Part of the reason that class mobility is going down. Although I think most of the production in class mobility is due to the disappearance of the high paid blue collar job in manufacturing

Supposedly manufacturing will be re- onshored in the next decade depending on who you talk to. So the tide may be turning?

[testacpwoek]

Meaningless when housing costs have soared. They've made wage gains because it's literally not worth it to work for $8/hr anymore and companies were unable to find workers.

[esoterica]

Wages for the lowest quintile have gone up in real terms, meaning adjusted for inflation (including shelter costs). None of your economic beliefs are grounded reality, you just make up beliefs that flatter your politics and downvote everyone who disagrees with you.

[rileymat2]

It would be good to get real numbers, the problem is inflation does not hit everyone equally; for example my house is paid off, the housing components do not affect me at all. So if they are growing faster than the rest of the basket it does not reflect in my life.

So real gains may or may not exist without looking at the individual or individual cohort you are talking about.

[testacpwoek]

I never downvote, your ad hominem is false and shows your emotionally charged mentality.

> None of your economic beliefs are grounded reality

If you think reality is defined in economic reports I have a bridge to sell you.

[VirusNewbie]

right but they're still made poorer due to M2 increasing and not being able to leverage into assets with debt.

[infamouscow]

The meaningless rhetoric of imbeciles.

If you're drowning in the ocean 100 ft below the surface, saying you managed to go 80 ft so you're still 20 ft below the surface is remarkably stupid and fails to appreciate the gravity of the situation.

[hammock]

Have they? Or are they all just taking on multiple part time jobs?

[wolverine876]

So what do you use that's better? Your personal experiences don't tell us much about the other 320+ million people.

[jonplackett]

They’re making a valid point, don’t shout them down by calling it a one off.

Quality of living is plummeting and inflation on things you actually care about is way more than the headline rate. Housing, for example takes up a vast proportion of income and the increase has been way over inflation.

I don’t think it’s headline news to state that the headline rate of inflation is not all that reflective of reality.

[dlp211]

> Quality of living is plummeting

Massive citation needed.

[jonplackett]

Go ask literally anyone you know that doesn’t work in tech and isn’t rich.

Or read any one of many articles about it.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/19/uk-living-s...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/17/obr-confirm...

https://www.cnbc.com/id/44962589

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/09/08/global-l...

[FactKnower69]

Who are you gonna trust: the government report, or your own lying eyes? No one I know outside of tech will ever be able to afford a home, but the TV says things are fine, so...

[throw0101c]

> Who are you gonna trust: the government report, or your own lying eyes?

The CPI is a national average for an average basket of goods; your local conditions may be different. It has zero connection to your personal budget.

In Canada the headline national number was 2.8%, but the province of Alberta (as a 'whole') had 4.2%, while Manitoba had 0.9%:

* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240319/dq240... (Chart 5) * https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/2018016/cpi-ipc... * https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=181000... (searchable by province)

StatCan has a "Personal Inflation Calculator" where you can enter your own numbers/budget and find a number that may be closer to what's happening around you:

* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020015...

Remember: the CPI is a model of reality, and not reality itself. It is used as a guide, and to use the words of [Alfred Korzybski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski):

* [The map is not the territory.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map–territory_relation) * https://fs.blog/map-and-territory/

Or those of statistician George Box:

* [All models are wrong but some are useful.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong)

[spaceman_2020]

My personal experience makes me miserable because I see so much misery around me

I couldn’t care less what’s happening in some government statistical bureau. That doesn’t affect the quality of my day to day life.

But when I catch up with old friends, see young colleagues, talk to cashiers at the store, and they all have tales of misery, I feel miserable.

[pdonis]

> So what do you use that's better?

If the government would stop trying to micromanage the economy, then it wouldn't need to find some aggregate statistic to use, no matter how misleading or counterproductive it was.

[NikolaNovak]

>>government would stop trying to micromanage the economy

Right, but some of us are not religious, so proposals needs a little bit more than the blind faith of "take your hands off the wheel and I'm sure everything will magically be better for everybody, particularly the poor".

[AtlasBarfed]

Deregulation has not lead to a utopia of competition in free markets, rather virtually every market is a cartel or monopoly with heavy regulatory capture.

This is probably the best example of government lack of regulation, considering that their ample laws against monopoly's, cartels and duopolies from the days of Teddy Roosevelt's administration

They are effectively not enforced, or if enforcement is attempted corporate legal departments now have an effective means of defeating them since the Microsoft trial

[pdonis]

> Deregulation has not lead to a utopia of competition in free markets, rather virtually every market is a cartel or monopoly with heavy regulatory capture.

You're contradicting yourself. You can't have "regulatory capture" and "deregulation" at the same time.

As a matter of actual fact, we do have lots of regulatory capture, which has resulted in huge swaths of regulation that favors large corporations who can afford lobbyists, and disfavors smaller business that actually are the most productive part of our economy. With what results, we see.

> They are effectively not enforced

Antitrust law enforcement has indeed been irregular since they were passed--but what enforcement has been done has done more harm than good. The classic cases of antitrust enforcement, such as Standard Oil or Alcoa Aluminum, resulted in higher prices and scarcer products for consumers--i.e., a negative impact, not a positive impact.

However, antitrust laws are a very small part of the total body of regulations that affect businesses. It's just that most of those regulations are written by executive branch bureaucrats instead of Congress. The Federal Register is much larger than the United States Code, and includes much more detailed micromanagement of all kinds of business activities. Which, again, favors the large corporations that bought those regulations in order to hamstring their competitors, smaller businesses who are more productive but less able to absorb the costs of compliance with that huge mass of regulations.

[AtlasBarfed]

I am not contradicting myself. Laws that breaks up companies that are too large is totally different than complex approval/regulatory commissions where internal lobbying and various other advantages give you the keys to the castle

The only regulatory capture in play against antitrust is bribery of the judicial system officials, which we now know is rampant, and employing executive and congressional pressure on the DoJ, which obviously exists.

[wolverine876]

It worked really well historically, before central banks, Keynes, Friedman ...

[NikolaNovak]

I genuinely don't know if that's extremely snarky sarcasm or extremely earnest opinion.

(if I said it it would be completely sarcastic, but some people do idealize the far past and probably mean it honestly, presumably because they mentally imagine / assume they wouldn't be in one of the sucky classes of society)

[wolverine876]

Government likes to terrify people with stories of depression (and fascism and climate change) in order to grab more power for themselves and the elite. If you play the game then you too can get paid - get a PhD, keep your eyes down and march like they say, and they'll pay you to play with numbers that make them look credible.

But people are waking up. The Internet has democratized information (sorry, it's popularized it), and now the elite gatekeepers in colleges can't stop anyone from gathering economic data with their own eyes and doing economic analysis. I can see how much a loaf of bread costs; I can see my basket of goods and my supermarket receipt.

Just kidding. I really think the lack of humanities education, especially history and literature, makes people - especially in SV and the wider less-educated world - very vulnerable to this nonsense. It's transparent nonsense if you understand it, but if you toss away generations of understanding about its technique and manipulative power and effects, you are a babe in the woods.

"Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child." - Cicero

[pixl97]

We've done that before... the boom bust cycles were far worse.

[bsdpufferfish]

Yep, societies just don't function until you establish a central bank with fiat currency and fractional reserve banking. It's a law of human nature.

[pdonis]

> the boom bust cycles were far worse.

No, they weren't. The worst depression in history, the Great Depression of the 1930s, occurred after the Federal Reserve was in place in the US, and similar central banks were in place in other developed countries.

[throw0101c]

> All the younger people I know in less than stellar jobs are really hurting.

And? It has always sucked to be poor / have less. That doesn't mean that the measurement of prices via CPI is inaccurate.

The fact that capitalism has run amok and income inequality is growing doesn't mean the statisticians at the BLS are wrong or are cooking the books.

[spaceman_2020]

That would have been true if CPI was a purely economic issue. But it’s also a political issue and once politics is involved, there is vast incentive to fudge and massage the data to fit a narrative.

[throw0101c]

> But it’s also a political issue and once politics is involved, there is vast incentive to fudge and massage the data to fit a narrative.

[citation needed]

The CPI has been verified over and over again. There's open source software where you can do things yourself:

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

It is probably the most looked at number that the government releases. There are economics professors/researchers, statistics professors/researchers, economists at hedge fund, economists at pension fund, economists at labour unions, bond traders, equities traders, etc, looking at the numbers every month. No one professionally involved with it thinks it's fudged.

There are certainly different methodologies, and that is often debated (e.g., how best to measure Shelter for homeowners versus renters), but for the current system, I'd like to see which non-tin foil hat wearing people (i.e., not Shadowstats.com) think it is being fudged and how.