Re:It Feels Like the Game Is Rigged
by jfengel on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @06:13PM
(#26008372)
I don't see anything wrong with accounting for substitutions. If beef is too expensive this month, then people do switch to chicken. They haven't lost anything.
It would be false if somehow this became an infinite treadmill where the basket went from beef to chicken to lentils to sawdust, but that's not what happens. The substition smooths out short term changes in price the same way people actually do.
The economy acquires robustness through this redundancy, and the CPI measure reflects that. It's far from a perfect measure, but its failures aren't caused by the perfectly commonplace action of buying the cheapest goods today. Insisting that it has to be precisely the same goods would indeed be a distorted measure of the economy.
It would be false if somehow this became an infinite treadmill where the basket went from beef to chicken to lentils to sawdust, but that's not what happens. The substition smooths out short term changes in price the same way people actually do.
The economy acquires robustness through this redundancy, and the CPI measure reflects that. It's far from a perfect measure, but its failures aren't caused by the perfectly commonplace action of buying the cheapest goods today. Insisting that it has to be precisely the same goods would indeed be a distorted measure of the economy.