There was an article the other week from Canada about their CPI (I can't find it right now). Their CPI calculation was using prices that were half those available in stores (butter was one product, there are large variations in prices for some primary products in Canada because of producer's co-operatives particularly in dairy), and used sizes for some products that haven't existed for decades.

CPI calculations are very tricky. Deflation in telecoms, for example, has been very understated because how do you compare a data plan with a voice plan (in the UK, they had to adjust two decades of CPI numbers because of this calculation error). Imo, we place far too much reliance on CPI which is, after all, only one measure of inflation. Everyone seems to believe that prices are rising faster than CPI, and they would probably be right (I am in the UK, food prices in Canada particularly are...out of this world...particularly for meat, which seems to cost at least 3x the price here).

Is [this](https://www.thestar.com/business/2021/10/23/experts-say-stat...) the article?

Yes.

So, two things.

First? I think this is an ad. Newspapers are paid for placement articles like this all of the time. Now, how much oversight is placed upon such ads-articles, depends upon the publication.

The Star is well respected, so I suspect there's some strong oversight on opt-ads by them. EG "Please write about us", more than "Here's an article we've written for you." However, I'd be surprised if some cash didn't change hands.

Second? This doesn't mean the premise is wrong. Part of the problem is how vast Canada is. Local production in Canada, crossing 4+ timezones and 10000km, is going to result in local shortages of products, and thus, local price spikes in produces.

For example, if you have a local butter shortage one year, shipping from 5k away will raise the price.

Again, my above comments aren't meant to debunk this article, just provide some additional data.

Oh, also.. pricing is indeed different in the UK and Canada. I visited... 5? years ago, during a particularly rain free, heat wave summer. Was nice, btw. :) But during my visit I did see those massive pricing differences in some things.

Of course, UK pricing for wood and fuel was outrageous for me (just things I noticed, and these are things plentiful in Canada).

But you're right about market controls in Canada, which are designed to ensure supply, and keep farmers in a profitable state. The US, for example, does this in a different manner, for example, they don't limit production, they buy excess.

On the dairy side for example, they buy excess milk and make "government cheese", which can be stored longer than milk (years), and is often given to the poor.

Keep in mind that CPI is an average based on what people actually pay, which often lags market rate.

For housing, you might not pay market rate due to having bought a house long ago, or rent control, or some other way of getting a sweetheart deal.

That is a really good point.

I also have a pet theory that CPI understates the cost of housing due to people who are pushed out of entering the market altogether (e.g. homelessness rising, people living with parents longer)

Sort of the same way some people say unemployment figures understate the true number by ignoring discouraged workers / people who have stopped looking altogether. I have a hunch there are many discouraged folks who have stopped looking for housing altogether.

You should take a look at Pia Maloney and Eric Weinstein work.

CPI is broken because it doesn't factor in a "change in taste or prefence"

CPI treats individuals as a giant unmovimg population mean.

To counter they change to use vector fields.

Of course preference is included in CPI. Weightings are adjusted periodically as consumer spending patterns shift, and price elasticity is explicitly factored on a quarterly basis in chained cpi

Housing is not in CPI. They use "owners' equivalent rent" which is a subjective (cooked) metric.

Well, it’s based on a survey. (And surveys are cursed instruments [1].)

> Generally, owners' equivalent rent is obtained through surveys asking homeowners the following question: "If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished and without utilities?" [2]

I would guess that some owners’ ideas of what their house would rent for might lag the market?

[1] https://carcinisation.com/2020/12/11/survey-chicken/

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/owners-equivalent-rent....

So what housing cost metric should be looked at? The cost for a retiree living in their paid off home? The mortgage payment for brand new homeowner with minimal down? The cost to split an apartment for 2 people? What objective measure should be used?

CPI will never been perfect. They could even break it down into 3 categories: 1. Poor man’s CPI: ramen, rent & public transit 2. Middle class’s CPI: house, beef & cars 3. Rich man’s CPI: penthouse, luxury goods & sports teams

All of them? The government has this data already it just needs to be aggregated by someone motivated.

How do you combine them into one number, in a way that isn't "cooked"? Proposing we mash up all data ever into one figure, without detailing how, is useless

Why would they necessarily be combined?

If you look at the Bureau of Labor and Statistics they will happily provide you with more detail, for instance the median salary in a field for the top 10% of employees versus the top 90%.

I don't know how you'd keep that updated though, you can hardly say "the amount the richest 10% spend is the rich CPI" because it's a silly statistic. I don't know how you can reasonably say "the minimum amount required to be rich", it just seems silly on its face.

No, I don't think there's much of a way to make it work. It's probably more directly useful to understand whether people are saving money or how much debt they have, though that's going to lag.

I mean, or just ask people. The government is fairly good at doing that.

I don't think they have to ask anyone. IRS and other agencies could pull all this information. IRS knows how much rent my landlord makes. County knows how many units are on the parcel my landlord owns and the landlords property tax burden. Lender reports mortgage data to the government, now you know my landlords mortgage. By aggregating just this info, most of which like the county parcel data already being public, you can get the true costs towards housing paid by everyone in the country living in housing.

For income once again you can turn to IRS tax return data. I believe IRS can also sum your accounts as well as review transaction history. Creditors also report debts to IRS.

All told I believe the federal government can access all the information needed to know exactly what almost every American is paying for housing, how much they are being paid, how much they are spending, and how much debt they have.

Medians aren't crooked.

CPI is almost certainly gamed.

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

Is it? Can’t game it much or for long without being obvious because it’s compounding. Let’s say inflation is understated by 4% absolute per year. Over 40 years, that’s a factor of 4.

https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices...

Is the fuel cost per mile traveled 4 times higher than it was in 1981? No. Fuel prices adjusted for CPI are about identical with what they were in 1981 ($3.80/gallon): https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices... And fuel efficiency has improved by about 40% in that time: https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-... (Even as vehicle reliability and safety and comfort have also gone up.)

Fuel would be hard to game. It’s just fuel. Other components are trickier to calculate, like aggregate food prices or things involving hedonic regression. If there is gaming, you’d have to look at the tricky parts.

Well if you don’t think we’ve gamed fuel but do think we’ve gamed CPI significantly (ie several percentage points per year for decades), then we have made REMARKABLE progress in reducing fuel costs over the last 40 years, with fuel efficiency improvements on top of that.

I don’t doubt that. Oil was expensive in the seventies for geopolitical reasons. Production has since become much more predictable and secure.

Since 2010 the cost of bread and milk has increased below CPI, and in general food at home has been below inflation too

Shadows stats has faced some criticism https://econbrowser.com/archives/2008/09/shadowstats_deb

Some wags have pointed out the price has been constant for many years https://web.archive.org/web/20080512223437/http://www.shadow...

The billion prices project independently collects prices and matches CPI well https://www.businessinsider.com/million-prices-project-vs-th...

Note that the inflation stats in Argentina *were* manipulated and official numbers differed from billion prices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project

ShadowStats is a crude derivative of CPI data so it’s gamed squared.

Housing in your area might get vastly more expensive, but housing somewhere else might not see the same price increase. The CPI is for the entire country

If they used the real inflation numbers, this problem would be even more astronomical than it is: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10522

because

> Mandatory expenditures, such as Social Security, Medicare, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program account for about 65% of the budget.

The budget is about 6 Trillion US dollars (FY22). Take 65% of 6 Trillion and start multiplying it by CPI and you'll see why it's in their best interest to understate it, and understate it greatly. If it were calculated higher, they'd have to borrow more than the $1.9 Trillion that they already are. To pay for a single year.

https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown-3305...

If you look at the debt chart, you'll notice it basically starts growing, and growing exponentially, around 1970, when Nixon took the US off the gold standard and going to a fiat currency with no real backing other than the gov'ts word, and the people believing in it. That's waning.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN/