alt Hacker NewsI’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
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> 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?
The game of Clue, and other games/toys, are in basket of goods because on average Americans spend some portion of their income per surveys:
* https://www.bls.gov/respondents/cpi/
The CPI published (and in headlines) isn't about your personal spending, but the spending on average spread over millions of people/households. The CPI is a model of reality, and so pointing to a particular instantiation of consumer will not match exactly:
I did not know about this, and it's excellent. Seems like a one-shot explanation for the "vibe-flation" phenomenon that many people find mystifying.
The CPI components are individually tracked and weighting is public. You can just play with the weights.
Toys for kids are absolutely a necessity in most households with kids.
This isn't really indexing in the same way that the CPI is indexing.
Alice pulls medians from other surveys (so it uses what I assume to be CPI food and CPI housing data, though they may also use other things), and then includes childcare and healthcare costs with some (imo) pretty painful assumptions, and then tacks on a random 10% "misc" category. It does a good job of creating a very high estimate of costs. As one example, I looked at the housing cost for an suburb I'm familiar with, and it lists the housing cost for a single individual as nearly $1800, you can pretty easily find 1BR apartments for 1-1.2K in that area, and utilities aren't going to run $600/mo, and you can pretty easily go cheaper.
And then again after doing that it tacks on a "misc" 10% budget item. I wouldn't call it a good estimate of "what people really need" and also it consumes the basket of goods, it doesn't compare to it.
Most households are able to afford more than the essentials and do care about the cost of entertainment.
There's value in the index you described as well, but IMO it doesn't make sense to use it as the basis for the overall economy.
I think the ALICE index is great for tracking pure essentials and survivability, which is definitely important, but it's also not unreasonable to track things that aren't 100% essential.
My household does care if basic games and toys are cheaper or more expensive; we have kids and want to get some amount of stuff for them. If the price changes we will get more or less of those things since our budget for them is limited. I probably won't fall into abject poverty if some non essential things go up in price, but I also will be buying less which has both personal and broader economic impacts.