So? The federal reserve would have to have a very different mandate for it to make policy based off of a basket optimized for public health. I'm sorry that your personal food prices are higher. I just don't see why it matters at scale.

Great, the price of ramen noodles and curved screen TVs is stable. Thanks, Fed, time to set interest rates at -1% for the next ten years of whacky growth.

Low inflation doesn't mean everything is fine, it just means that you don't have exponentially inflating prices on top of whatever other problems you've got.

Okay, but the experience of the average American is what actually matters when tallying inflation. It's not about what people "should" be spending money on, it's about what people actually spend money on.

Surely putting together an inflation index consciously designed not to replicate an average American diet would be a much, much worse measure of food inflation than one that does actually try to model the average American's situation? "Everyone should be going paleo so the index shouldn't have bread in it" is a self-evidently bad idea, that's not a statistician's job. A single inflation number is hardly ever going to be a correct measurement of any single person's experience of inflation, but that's inevitable.

There are real criticisms to make, such as the average basket of goods not characterizing the inflation felt by the poorest, because they spend money on different things than people with a bit more money.

Ok, since you strawmanned me against bread (which has also increased significantly, at least 5% YOY) , let's consider this: if nobody could afford anything but Doritos, and the price of Doritos went from $4 to $3, then the average basket of goods would go decrease in price >20%. It's a great model if you want to hide the deteriorating quality of life behind effectively meaningless stats. What I don't understand is why so many people feel compelled to defend it so vigorously.

It just seems like people have extremely high expectations for what a single number could possibly encompass. It's a single, summary statistic- it's not going to ever be anything more than that. Of course low inflation doesn't mean everything's perfect and prices are just fine. It doesn't say anything about how poor or rich people are, what they can afford, or how wealth is distributed in society.

It is just an (imperfect!) aggregate measure of prices, and it certainly seems to capture something- inflation was low for a long time, then COVID, then it got high, then rates went up, then it went down again. When inflation is very high there aren't many inflation truthers going around insisting that actually, inflation is low; when inflation falls or stays low, there's always people insisting that actually not everything is great. Which: yes! You can have low inflation and all sorts of problems! But having those problems and high inflation is worse.

It's not hiding anything, it's just not rich enough to capture everything you're interested in.