I doubt the main commenter, meant it that way, why is there any need to bash them ?

It’s a political issue, well criticised and commented on, that governments intentionally game metrics like inflation, etc to look good on paper for incumbent presidents and heads of state.

Also, the inflation rate is a very inconsistent number, different regions of the US has different rent price increases, different cost of labour increases, different product prices for a lot of goods. How can the nation be entirely ruled by one common inflation rate.

All statistics like this which have to target so many regions, environments, and scenarios, always have to make decisions, that sacrifice some scenario or the other, where the “score” is a very poor indicator

This applies not just to inflation, but other metrics like gdp per capita, employment rate, etc.

There is no need for that condescending tone, especially when the author is talking about their increased cost of living, which prolly hurt their purchasing power.

His feelings are correctly placed though. Even though macro economists agree the current methodology is the least wrong, they also agree that the BLS series cannot explain why Americans have stopped saving and gone so deeply in debt. A slight error in BLS methodology, could explain that reality. So comparing the CPI to your own reality is clearly very rational.

Might be better than Krugman’s “no food, shelter, energy, or used cars” number

This is a nonsense reply.

You’re committing a fallacy of “Appeal to Authority”, even though your comment doesn’t make sense — obviously we need a consistent measure across decades if we want to compare inflation across decades. Comparing two numbers that measure different things is an apples-to-oranges comparison. (Which is what you’re arguing we should do.)

If you use a consistent measure from a 1980s basis, you’ll see that person is correct — as measured using the historic means, we’ve had ~40% inflation in the past few years and the highest rate of inflation in 40 years.

This chart uses the historic measure and bases in 1980.

https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

JFC

> Responding to prior criticisms made by economist James Hamilton, John Williams explained in a private phone call that Shadowstats does not actually recalculate BLS data, rather, the Shadowstats CPI merely adds a constant to the officially reported numbers.[25]

>> I’m not going back and recalculating the CPI. All I’m doing is going back to the government’s estimates of what the effect would be and using that as an add factor to the reported statistics

Same article says he charges $175/year/subscription since 2006.

I'd love to get paid that much to do a high school level introductory programming assignment. The business logic is literally a one liner X-D