I just filled up a propane tank, 3lbs of fuel was almost $10 whereas a year ago it was $5-$6
The price of a California burrito most places here is almost $10, they were closer to $7/$8 before pandemic started spiking beef prices
It’s getting harder and harder to keep the bill at Costco under $100
Uber/Lyft rides that used to be $10 cost $15-$20 during non-surge hours
And so on…
When I worked in Hawthorne in 2010, there was a $4 burrito option. When I left in 2013, it was a $5.50 burrito.
In the bay area, it seems like burritos with guacamole have been $9-11 for several years now.
Restaurant breakfast burritos have seemingly gone up from $8 to about $12 in the last two years.
Grocery store deli counter breakfast burritos have gone up from about $3.50 to about $4.50.
Microwave burritos have gone up from $not-worth-it to $not-worth-it + 2 over the last couple years.
The diner down the street from me makes the best breakfast burrito for about $9, enough to feed two people. It's pretty amazing, considering it would probably cost me $6 to recreate from the grocery store. My favorite coffee shop in 2019 had a $12 burrito that was a bit overpriced but worth it; they shut down months before the pandemic ramped up, though. I suspect it was partially because of the burrito price. Their food was expensive enough that my wife and I would always share an entree regardless of how hungry we were. We live in a touristy area, and there are local restaurants we won't even consider going to because it's so overpriced.
Great. And what was it 2 years ago? 3 years ago? In fact propane is still cheaper now than it was in 2018:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU05320104
So yes, perhaps propane has gone up since last year. But last year it was the cheapest it's been since 1999. So of course the YoY change is going to go up.
Further, in regards to CPI, what percentage of propane purchases make up of your expenses, either on a monthly or annual basis? In the US, "Propane, kerosene, firewood" make up .076% of the CPI:
* https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/household-fuels.htm
In general, household energy makes up 3.605%, with electricity being 2.628%. So while you may feel like it's a big deal, how much of your budget is it really impacting?
What were your expenses in all the various categories of spending last year, and what are they this year? Cherry picking one data point that you just happen to notice does not necessarily mean your expenses are much different in total.
In Canada, StatCan has a personal inflation calculator where you can enter your own expenses for a personal basket of goods:
* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020015...
I think if the BLS had a similar tool a lot of the "I think/feel inflation is more than x%" comments would be reduced, as people wouldn't be trying to extrapolate the average CPI to themselves.
Edit: in the spirit of worker solidarity though, if you can convince your boss to give you a 20% raise by showing them the M2 money supply, I fully support you in that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonmoore/2021/08/12/cpi-data-...
And that's flawed due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
[thing] increases in price: "omg inflation!"
[thing stays the same]: "meh"
result? "omg inflation!"
Is this effect global? Who knows, it’s anecdata
If only I had continued, I could've provided great anecdata here, because we never really "go out". And herein lies the crux. Many if not most other people I know go out regularly. Rain or shine, recently got kids or not etc. So the pandemic hitting would drive up their Costco bills even if prices stayed flat.
Happy to learn that the anecdata presented in this thread is from people like me. But otherwise my "felt" Costco bill has stayed almost the same (minus "normal" inflation).
All the data captured over the years omits very fine detail for the most part; things like weights and volumes and stuff. The data is fairly messy but there should have some signal within it however. This motivates me to revisit what sort of receipt OCR stuff is out there, it's been a TODO for a long time. I'm looking for mainly partially automated stuff, fully automate the frequent vendors, manual entry the rest: https://gist.github.com/jxramos/db8195d1972b6d7f7eb0e97be51d...
I even went as far as building a small mobile app using AWS OCR. I was able to itemize and categorize using that but it still required manual "fingerprinting" of each receipt type. Basically figuring out that something was a Costco receipt and in Costco receipts this column in the OCR'd text was the name of the item etc and then also defining the mapping of item name to category.
Worked well enough but I wasn't willing to pay for this after all the free trials and such if it couldn't be monetized by releasing the app. And since the fingerprinting is pretty cumbersome and error prone (Costco doesn't even have a global standard for their receipt format, never mind different gas stations etc) and I neither have the expertise nor the necessary training data for a machine learning approach.
did I say it wasn't? The BLS freely admits that inflation is higher than usual at 5.4% YOY. What's being disputed is whether it's 5.4% as the BLS claims or 20% as GGP claims.
>Is this effect global? Who knows, it’s anecdata
The problem is that listing a bunch of things that's gone up by 20% doesn't mean the overall CPI went up 20%. CPI is a weighted measure, so the things you listed only contribute 1% to it, then it can go up 2000% and the CPI wouldn't be anywhere close to the claimed 20%.
the "very real price increases" you're seeing is clouded by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic. The CPI uses a fixed basket to weigh the different price increases. Meanwhile in your head, your brain weighs price increases based on the shock factor. That lyft ride that got 2x more expensive? That's going to have much more mental weight than your rent that stayed about the same, even though the rent makes up 40% of your monthly spend and your lyft rides makes up 5%.
Ubers have also increased in price.
Groceries.. have not.
You say this like no one measures inflation, but in fact we do measure inflation quite carefully, and it's nowhere near 20%.
> Pricing information is then sent to our national office, where specialists who have detailed knowledge about the particular goods or services review the data. These specialists check the data for accuracy and consistency, and make any necessary corrections or adjustments. Adjustments can range from an adjustment for a change in the size or quantity of a packaged item, to more complex adjustments based upon statistical analysis of the value of an item's features or quality. Thus, commodity specialists strive to prevent changes in the quality of items from affecting the CPI's measurement of price change.
> Hedonic quality adjustment is one of the techniques the CPI uses to account for changing product quality within some CPI item samples. Hedonic quality adjustment refers to a method of adjusting prices whenever the characteristics of the products included in the CPI change due to innovation or the introduction of completely new products.
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm#Question_1...
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans...
But what proportion do [thing] and [thing stays the same] make up of your budget? That's why the CPI uses a basket of goods, each in proportion to what the average person uses in their lives to find the average inflation.
And some [thing]s may be more noticeable than others: yes, gas may have gone up, but your care insurance perhaps hasn't, and so perhaps hasn't parts and maintenance. But you fill up more often so you notice those prices more and suffer recency bias.
In Canada, StatCan actually has a "Consumer Price Index Personal Inflation Calculator" so that you can find the quantitate number to your personal experience of inflation give your personal basket of goods, versus the average one:
* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020015...
If supply chain problems or availability cause prices to go up, that's still inflation. They might call it transitory inflation or whatever, but they won't say "well that's just supply chain problems so we won't count it for this month".
Most places have gone up about $3 since start of the pandemic.
As for the LA cali burrito heads: don't step dudes. Y'all got plenty of great food that kicks our asses. But we have the best calimex, hands down. "Don't ever argue with a San Diegan about Mexican food"
I'd almost shed a tear.
If I normally spend $2k a month, but then lose my job and get $2k from the government, that's not going to cause inflation.
From what I understand, much of the stimulus money was saved. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT
That $2k a month that you used to earn is still out there somewhere unaccounted for.
In short this is the equivalent of not printing money.
The very reason why you print money is to spend it. If you didn't want to spend money. Why print it?
"M2 Money Supply vs. CPI and GDP"
220x increase in the money supply vs 18x increase in CPI
The only real anomaly in that chart is 2011, which is concealed by the fact that CPI is a terrible inflation metric when wealth inequality is changing (see the increase in equities and real estate during that period).
For reference: CPI is based on a survey to see what median Americans are buying, the prices of those things, and how much of them they are buying. Naturally, people change their spending habits when prices rise to buy cheaper items, and this cancels out the how much of them they buy to end up with an effective metric of "how much are median Americans spending" (hint: basically all of their money). So CPI measures the median American's income, which is why there can never be any changes in "real wages" [0].
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
I get it, M2 really seems like it should correspond with inflation but at minimum you need to adjust for economic growth. As we produce and consume more we need more money handle those transactions.
The reason CPI is a terrible metric is because measuring inflation is very difficult and somewhat arbitrary (see for example: hedonic adjustments). M2 is a significant, consistent, and logical factor. Even from 1980-1986, rapid changes in M2 consistently correspond to a change in inflation. But there are other factors, like real economic growth, population growth, changes in size of the labor force and velocity of money.
That’s some serious weasel wording right there. Either a model fits real world data or it doesn’t, ignoring all those times a model failed isn’t an eye for data it’s a delusion.
> And all the people predicting decade-high inflation and asset inflation since last year have been right so far.
That’s little different from walking into a room full of broken clocks picking those that are currently accurate and suggesting they must be working fine. If you select for people who accurately predicted the last year you then need to look at their predictions of every prior year.
> What I feel...
versus:
> facts...
CPI adjusts for package sizes.
“According to Zillow, the typical value of U.S. homes is $269,039 as of January 2021, a 9.1% increase from January 2020. Between 1999 and 2021, the median price has more than doubled from $111,000 to $269,039.”
Shouldn't the median sale account for this? If there's a buyer presumably somebody wants to live there, and if there are 1000 sales in CA but 10 in SD that would be accounted for as well.
but inflation (as measured by CPI) isn't anywhere close to 20%?