[MilStdJunkie]

Everything about the official inflation calculation is almost totally borked in terms of generating useful information. Like, information that would be useful for someone doing something real, like future historians or Zombie FDR.

There's probably dozens of mechanisms at work to explain "why??!!", but the root cause is - like so many other damn things in America - financialization, from its birth post-1972 with vehicles like EUROBOND, to its "pedal to the metal" moment with all the liquidated commie national assets, to the craptacular commodity runup crisis courtesy of Bush II wrecking the Levant and West Asia. Oh, right, and the financial system ending in 2008. When we seamlessly blended up - legally - private with public risk. Oh yeah. Sixteen years ago.

Anyway, financialization. We don't account for money supply accurately, they're dynamic with price indices now, blabbity blabbity blah blah, 1962 dollars were probably worth waaaayyyyyyyyy more than we think they were.

[astrange]

There is no number of 1962 dollars that could buy you an electric car, HPV vaccine, or Nintendo DS, which means they're worthless if you want to buy those things.

(Since you can't time travel from 1962 to a point where those existed. If you just waited for them, then presumably you've kept them in an interest-bearing account in the meantime, and so the value of the dollar doesn't apply.)