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Comment by jjcon | Hacker News Reader

Read: Journalists and pundits need FUD to survive so let’s question longstanding economic measurements because it suits us

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If they really want something to question it should be how inflation is calculated. Almost everything is going up in price and it doesn't seem to reflect in the inflation. How it's calculated really needs to be revisited and modernized.

That's a cost of living index. Switching from COGI to COLI would be fraught with political nooses for a politician to hang themself with. If the switch were to happen poor people might take more notice of how badly they're being taken advantage of by the Company Store known as the stock market when they can point to the cost of living index and ask why the COLI went up 30% and they got a 0.5% raise.

What is COGI?

Cost of goods index

>If they really want something to question it should be how inflation is calculated. Almost everything is going up in price and it doesn't seem to reflect in the inflation.

Or maybe there's section bias going on? ie. everything you're worried about is going up in price.

There is unquestionably a huge amount of inflation in the things the upper classes spent money on - real estate, investments, etc. This seems to me to be indicative of a lot of upper class people benefitting from the upward redistribution of wealth that has been ongoing for the last 25 years.

The impression I get is that it's not things going up in price, but that sales are much less common. For the person who watches for sales this matters, but the inflation rate isn't calculated that way.

Your comment doesn't reflect reality at all. For the years prior to the 2016 elections, the economic news was loaded with optimism and high-fives - while the majority of US counties were stocked with people who regularly went without food.

It's not that there was zero improvement; it's that the pace of recovery in most of the US was a small fraction (often near zero) of what it was in the wealthy regions.

This is, bluntly, a very low effort comment.

a) It's not journalists questioning these numbers, it's politicians and economists, and b) the criticism is long-standing and entirely accurate. Folks have been criticising this statistic for many years, and COVID has only made those criticisms more salient.

The top-line unemployment numbers factor out a large number of cohorts. For example, the number of people who've permanently stopped looking for work aren't counted.

COVID has inflated numbers in those cohorts and the top-line figure is likely understating these effects as a consequence.

Unfortunately, you've opted for a pithy dismissal based on, frankly, a cliche about mass media that offers no value or insight.

~Read:~ Misread:

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