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A comment on Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth?. Parent comment

Re:Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth? by skybrian on Thursday October 25, 2018 @05:57PM (#18304925)
The inflation rate does include rent, or "imputed rent" for home owners. However, it's an average of what people actually pay, including people who somehow got a sweet deal on housing costs, through rent control or buying their house a long time ago or whatever. It's not going to match the prices you see advertised when you're looking to move.
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Re:Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth? by gruez on Thursday October 25, 2018 @09:30PM (#18306069)
>However, it's an average of what people actually pay, including people who somehow got a sweet deal on housing costs

which is arguably the more accurate way of measuring consumer prices.

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Re:Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth? by Gibbon1 on Friday October 26, 2018 @12:37AM (#18306810)
That not accurate because important information about the spatial distribution gets filtered out. Economists are pretending their statistics are filtering out 'noise' when they are really filtering out data they don't want people to see.
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Re:Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth? by skybrian on Friday October 26, 2018 @02:06PM (#18311519)
Inflation is an average. Newspapers usually report the national average, but there are a lot of other averages and they aren't being kept secret. This page has data for California:

http://www.dof.ca.gov/Forecasting/Economics/Indicators/Infla...

I don't think anyone is all that interested in a bunch of dry statistics. No conspiracy is needed.

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Re:Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth? by Gibbon1 on Friday October 26, 2018 @05:22PM (#18312801)
The problem is while other statistics exist in practice policy makers, political leaders, businessmen, and economists in general have come ignore them. Rather than believing some small brained primate on the internet, here is Paul Volcker saying the same thing.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-24/what-s...

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Re:Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth? by EADGBE on Friday October 26, 2018 @09:56AM (#18309230)
> Economists are pretending their statistics are filtering out 'noise' when they are really filtering out data they don't want people to see.

You could really replace "Economist" with anything in this statement.

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Re:Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth? by GhostVII on Thursday October 25, 2018 @09:30PM (#18306070)
Wasn't that also the case historically though? Rent control has been around for a while.
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Re:Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth? by skybrian on Friday October 26, 2018 @01:48PM (#18311402)
Sure, it's not new.

Another way to put it is that housing costs used to calculate inflation will lag market prices, because the cost is often locked in for a while. When prices go up, people often don't immediately start paying the new price.

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