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0 pointshn_throwaway_992y ago0 comments

Measuring college costs against median household wages (vs. CPI) is a much fairer way to include impacts of inflation. First off, college tuition is part of the CPI, so it's not really mathematically accurate to then discount it based on CPI increases: "College is a lot more expensive, but don't worry, everything is a lot more expensive!"

And if you look at any graph of college costs vs wages over the past 40 years or so, they have simply skyrocketed.

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gruez2y ago· 3 in thread

>Measuring college costs against median household wages (vs. CPI) is a much fairer way to include impacts of inflation

"inflation" is by definition CPI. Therefore the claim that using another metric to "include the impacts of inflation" is tautologically false. The word you want is "affordability".

jmalicki2y ago

No it's not. There are many different US government measured indexes of consumer price inflation. The linked article discussed CPI-W (used by law to adjust social security payments), CPI-U, chained CPI-U (used to adjust tax rates), and PCE (used by the Fed for interest rate targeting).

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-does-the-government-m...

There is also PPI for producer prices, and the GDP deflator used for GDP.

If the US government and law already is using a number of different metrics to account for inflation impacts for different purposes, it absolutely makes sense to debate which particular measure is best for this area.

But there's not one single true number, different groups of people are affected by different measures (e.g. the use of CPI-W for social security payments is thoughtfully meant to be more representative of costs incurred by the typical social security recipient than is CPI-U)

gruez2y ago

>If the US government and law already is using a number of different metrics to account for inflation impacts for different purposes, it absolutely makes sense to debate which particular measure is best for this area.

Fair point, but in the context the previous comment, "wages" is basically never considered a serious contender for measuring inflation in economics.

AndyNemmity2y ago

Tautologically false, has to be one of the oddest things I've ever seen to be so wrong about.

Like, you're using big words to indicate that under no situation is this true, when the reality is that "inflation" is not by definition CPI. CPI is one measure of inflation.

But it just caught my eye that this seems, extra wrong. It's hard to read something extra wrong on the internet, and yet it feels like you've succeeded.

People are wrong on all of the time, but to call something tautologically false when it's trivially true, is peak wrongness.

fiprofessor2y ago

> And if you look at any graph of college costs vs wages over the past 40 years or so, they have simply skyrocketed.

Absolutely, no debate there. The particular surprising claim in question though was about whether they have declined in the past couple of years, relative to a peak in late 2010s. And there, measured either in CPI adjusted costs, or relative to real median wages, they have.

But of course, the drops are small, and it's only been about 1-2 years. I'm not sure this really indicates a sustained trend, or just the fact that college cost increases have (for once) lagged inflation over those 1-2 years.

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