Completely agree. And hedonic adjustments are not a bad thing either. As you say, inflation is an insanely complex beast that we don’t really understand.

But it’s worth pointing out that certain agencies use CPI imperfections when it suits them: the Fed has pointed to low inflation for years as justification to continue its monetary policies. And then when CPI no longer backs their actions, they change the narrative and claim it’s “transitory”.

CPI isn’t broken. It can’t be broken. It’s just a metric with a methodology.

But our interpretation of CPI is broken at best, and manipulative at worst.