but the BLS puts out figures for each category? https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t02.htm
I’m not that familiar with USA inflation but with Canadian inflation statistics, certain categories feel way off - such as housing. As someone who is considering buying a house their measure is useless.
BLS numbers are also controversial - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/consumerpriceindex....
Because it's based off "owners equivalent rent", not the sticker price of a house. The latter is somewhat problematic because a house is an investment, not an expenditure (unlike an apple or a doctor visit).
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/62f0014m/62f0014m2017001...
This is difficult for me to understand as there is no market price for what they are trying to estimate. They have a thousand knobs to guess at. It reads a bit like they are grouping people who’ve own their home for 50 years in with those who just bought - similar to how they calculate rent.
For example, they weight mortgage interest at less than utilities. For a new homeowner, mortgage interest is probably 5-10x utilities.
Regardless, they explicitly ignore the experience of a first time home buyer, who are pretty trapped into renting. A house is not just an investment, it’s a different experience owning versus renting.
>[...] For a new homeowner, mortgage interest is probably 5-10x utilities.
Sounds like you're upset that the index is an average of everyone, and therefore doesn't recognize your individual struggles?
>A house is not just an investment, it’s a different experience owning versus renting.
Eating food grown yourself is a different experience than shopping at the supermarket. Should we factor farm land cost into the CPI?
> Eating food grown yourself is a different experience than shopping at the supermarket. Should we factor farm land cost into the CPI?
If 70% of the population paid for a "gardening experience" like they do for gym memberships, etc then yeah I would expect that to be in CPI.
What I feel is that mortgage payments have doubled in 10 years for new buyers. However, because new buyers are a small fraction of existing buyers this doesn't rapidly affect inflation as they calculate it.
Thanks for trying to explain it, I feel pretty dumb as I'm clearly missing something obvious.
The other thing is the cost of the house itself, not the housing services. This includes the purchasing cost and the cost of repairs that you make periodically. The repairs are not a problem but the purchasing cost would need to be spread over the useful life of the house. If the house is bought on credit then the buyer will also incur funding costs (i.e. in the form of interest payments), but these can't be considered costs that are related to housing. They are separate. It's like if you buy a car on credit you'll pay more than if you paid for it with your savings, but that doesn't mean the car is more expensive.
CPI includes housing services and repairs. As far as I know, it doesn't include houses, probably because they're considered an investment good, while CPI is concerned with consumer goods. At any rate, mortgage payments are not a good estimate of how much houses cost. The reasons are interest, which is a different cost, and the fact that principal payments are arbitrary as they vary depending on things like mortgage length, and so on.
Anyway, I understand that many people feel strongly about CPI and inflation measurements, but while cost accounting is not rocket science it's not completely straightforward either, and most of the time criticism of CPI by layman people turns out to be misguided.
> Every month, the rental prices paid by the households in the sample are compared with the rental prices they paid the previous month
When rent control caps rent increases this becomes a lagging indicator. Why don't they try to estimate market rent?
This feels similar to my problem with the owner cost estimate. Consider a hypothetical about cars - in a world where everyone buys new cars with 8 years of financing, suddenly there is a car shortage (chips or whatever). The price of a new car doubles. As very few owners need to buy a new car every year, on average their costs are about the same as last year despite a 100% increase in the cost of a new car.
If you live in Vancouver, it's easy to forget 93% of the country doesn't.
From 1995 to just pre-pandemic, my home (in the US, far away from California) appreciated significantly less than inflation.
I expect if you can help people/financial advisors understand their future expenditure needs there is a lot of value in it.