Here's an interesting experiment I recommend for anyone believing ShadowStats as anything but nonsense. You can prove it yourself quite easily.

1. Take ShadowStasts claimed inflation (dig, you'll find their historical graph), which they generally have much higher than BLS rates, and take BLS rates, and compute the compounded inflation over say 20-30 years.

2. Pick a decent batch of things you buy: housing, rent, food, gas, cars, etc. (making your basket of goods - scale according to what you spend on them, like a normal basket of goods would do)

3. Find ads from now and from the start of the timeframe. Gather prices. Put in Excel or Google Docs

4. See which is more accurate: BLS or ShadowStats.

5. Conclude ShadowStats is absolute nonsense, and ban it from your thinking, since you just proved to yourself it is nonsense. Reading it makes one significantly less connected to demonstrable reality.

The first time I did this it was amazing how far ShadowStats was from reality. I've been recommending this to friends for years - most realized what nonsense it is and learned to see if there's simple ways to check things themselves. And this is an easy test anyone can do with a little effort.

ShadowStats writes for a specific audience: people who distrust official statistics in general, and inflation statistics in particular. As you can see in this thread (and likely also by talking to most people you know personally), this is a sizable group, so it's likely a pretty good, sustainable business, just like health/diet fads or self-help books. The story does fall apart under scrutiny, but the susceptible audience is replenished faster than the claims can be debunked.

Amusingly, highly educated people who are disdainful of anti-vaxers or Gwyneth Paltrow quackery can easily believe that inflation is an order of magnitude higher than officially reported, or that they the evil/incompetent bureaucrats leave out food, shelter, healthcare and/or energy costs from the calculation or some such.

As an academic economist turned machine learning/SWE, I'd say there are plenty of knowledgeable people around on HN, but on matters of economics and health, the signal-to-noise is definitely much lower than on anything related to computers.

Agreed. It's why over the years I've come up with experiments like the above that I can give to capable yet deluded people to check things on their own. It amazes me how many otherwise smart people eat the huge amount of crappy, conspiratorial economic nonsense widespread on many forums, including unfortunately a lot of HN and Reddit threads.

It's why I love such clean examples as the Shadowstats nonsense. It's completely debunkable in an hours work.

The criticism I’ve read of ShadowStats is that they don’t actually recompute inflation using different methodology—they just add a constant of their own choosing to all the official inflation figures.

This chart isn't remotely plausible. No legitimate difference in reporting mechanisms or standards would exactly match every upswing and downswing - if you're weighing the basket differently, you'll get spikes at different times. They have to be just making up a constant value and adding it to the official statistics. (You'll note that the reporter in the linked article didn't ask anyone other than the people who made the graph whether it made sense.)

Tell that story to the government bond markets. The investors would love to hear those numbers and instantly demand 10% interest...

No, I'm serious. If these numbers were accurate then you wouldn't even be able to make money off the stock or housing market. Everyone would be losing money.

What's it like falling for literally fake news? If those charts don't set off your bullshit detector... Well... You should probably stop trusting yourself on many things.

> http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

The irony of ShadowStats:

> So, here we are 3 years later and the price for a Shadow Stats subscription still hasn’t budged! At $175 for a year long subscription, you still get the same Shadow Stats. The cost of the subscription has remained the same even as inflation has moved higher. So, in real terms, there’s actually been deflation in the cost of a Shadow Stats subscription.

* https://www.pragcap.com/update-theres-still-deflation-in-hyp...

That was written in 2014. It's now (late) 2021 and and the price is still $175. :)

I'd love to learn more about this, if you have sources.

Because this sounds like exactly what's happening.

How to Own the World by Andrew Craig explains this in the inflation chapter.