What if, as an engineer, you were forced to work with a measuring tape whose graduations change all the time?

As a matter of fact, what if you were ask to build things using a measuring tape with graduations that are increasingly far apart over time?

I'd wager you would be a little upset and quickly ask for a proper measuring tape so you could do your job properly.

Sounds reasonable, right?

However, the exact same thing is happening in economics: everything is measured with a measuring stick whose length changes all the time.

And this does not seem to worry anyone: economists merrily keep on measuring things like household debt in USD and everyone seem to agree it's the right way to work.

A good and proper shared hallucination.

Worse, the length of the measuring stick is changed, not in a random fashion, but in a way that makes the power that be look good on TV.

Once in a while, people try to do the right thing and present inflation-corrected numbers, but that's far from being the norm.