alt Hacker NewsThanks to NPR for this important reporting; it sucks that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down after losing all of its funding.
This "basked of goods" approach to understanding price inflation seems outdated to me. 114 items! It seems to me like there must be organizations out there with tons and tons of price and consumer spending data for thousands and thousands of items, right? It should be possible to get much more comprehensive measurement of price changes over time vs and approach taken like this one (or the CPI, for that matter).
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The Economist tried to solve this in the past with https://www.economist.com/interactive/big-mac-index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index for non-subscribers)
Credit card companies have all of this data. They could track classes of spending and regress out rising incomes, age, etc.
> Thanks to NPR for this important reporting
It's fascinating to see such work. By the grace of NPR, apparently the "transient inflation" narrative is officially inoperative, and plebian concerns about the price of eggs are now worthy!
Will wonders never cease?
1. It sounds like you're just describing a larger "basket of goods"? That data is available, but also valuable, and I'm not sure why the basket of goods tracked by the CPI or NPR would be inadequate.
2. This specific exercise is designed to be relatable to individuals (in general, and specifically ones such as the people interviewed in the article who claimed that their grocery bill went up about 50% in a year, which is implausible to put it politely) so that they can understand the actual level of inflation rather than the one they imagined in their head.
I’ve had a gripe with “basket of goods” approach. Does a household really care that much if the game of clue is 10% cheaper in 2025?
There needs to be an index that reflects what people really need and the closest I’ve found is the ALICE index: https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index