Canada has always had far better statistics than the US. Both for CPI and for unemployment. This often leads to Canada looking worse, for example, by having a higher unemployment rate, when instead, Canada just has a much better way of counting who is actually unemployed.

> There is no internationally agreed upon method for housing/shelter

Agreed. But, I think that we can also agree that basing most of the number on asking people what the imaginary rent of their home might be is totally worthless.

> In the Canadian CPI paper there is some explanation towards the complexities of shelter / owner accommodation:

And you'll note that Canada doesn't use Owners' Equivalent Rent, never mind making it the majority of the index. Instead it actually computes what it would likely cost to rent that dwelling: mortgage, replacement cost, property taxes, maintenance, and other costs. That's a far more rational way of doing it.

StatCan themselves acknowledge there is no 'standard' way of doing it:

* https://old.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceCanada/comments/z14p...

And plenty of folks in Canada think like you do: that the official way Is Wrong and Some Other way should be used—often pointing to the US as the way it should be done. And yet here is someone in the US saying the Canadian way should be the way. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At the end of the day, you have some things that are a huge component of the CoL for some people (housing, car) that are fairly modest for others who have a paid-off mortgage or live in a LCoL area and either don't own a car or drive a paid-off old one.

Assuming the inflation of those items differ significantly from a broader basket of goods, there's no way to have a single measure that reasonably represents price increases for the two groups.

Why not just measure "actual" rent values, instead of owners predictions of rent? Is that just crazy talk?

They do? Under Shelter, the BLS has "Rent of primary residence" and "Owners’ equivalent rent of residences":

* https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...

This is because some portion of the population are renters and some are owners, so they both need to be reflected.

Owners equivalent is an insane, distortionary metric here when you can just look at the market data for similar sized properties. No one who was going to rent their house would do a survey of what their neighbors with similar sized homes think they should charge for it. They’d look at what the market rate is for their neighborhood. This is, of course, what property management companies actually do on behalf of owners.

The BLS and US CPI moved toward the current system for valid 'technical' reasons because the previous way was agreed upon to be bad:

* https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1982/06/art2full.pdf

Further, there is no internationally agreed upon method for housing/shelter, with pros and cons for each:

> International statistical agencies have unanimously adopted the net acquisition approach for durables, but there is no consensus about the best approach to the treatment of OA in the CPI16 (Table 1). Rental equivalence is the most popular approach among countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development.17 Johnson’s (2015) recent review of the U.K. CPI proposes using CPIH, which includes the costs of OA and is based on a rental- equivalence approach, as the U.K.’s main measure of inflation. Several countries in the European Union have refrained from incorporating OA into their CPI, although Eurostat is currently conducting a pilot study for the euro area based on the net acquisition approach. Australia and New Zealand use a net acquisition approach, while Sweden and Finland—like Canada—are using a partial user-cost approach. No country has adopted a full-fledged user-cost approach.

* https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/boc-r...

Seems like any particular system has pros and cons. Someplace else in this thread someone mentioned that Canada's system for Shelter is better, but even StatCan recognizes limitations of what they use:

* https://old.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceCanada/comments/z14p...

And plenty of folks in Canada think like you do: that the official way Is Wrong and Some Other way should be used—often pointing to the US as the way it should be done. And yet elsewhere in the thread someone in the US saying the Canadian way should be the way. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You’re completely missing my point: we already have firms who do what the BLS claims to be doing that have greater predictive power and determinative impact on what people play for housing. Ignoring that reality to shrug and go “lots of countries measure things in ways that don’t make any sense so what can you do” is not a refutation of anything.

> You’re completely missing my point: we already have firms who do what the BLS claims to be doing that have greater predictive power and determinative impact on what people play for housing.

I agree that what the BLS is doing is not predictive. Because that's not the point of the CPI: it's measuring what happened in the past.

That's why the numbers that were released on October 12, 2023 were for what happened in September 2023, not November 2023.

See also determinative, which is what the BLS is trying to measure, i.e. what would be actually paid were the housing made available as a rental. No firm trying to calculate rents for a new rental would do what the BLS does, which is why their number are bullshit. If you can’t acknowledge this, it seems like you’re just being intentionally obtuse.

From your pragcap link:

> Sometimes I feel like people read some econ 101 and the admittedly intuitive idea that inflation is “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”, but didn’t stop to think that it might be a lot more complex than that.

This is the case with almost every armchair economics comment. The same thing happens with the complexity of affordable housing: “It’s all just supply and demand! Econ 101!”