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Comment by jrsj | Hacker News Reader

Somehow everyone seems has this experience, rents have continued to climb at a high rate for the last decade, and they manage to downplay this in statistics.

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In 2011, my rent was $1,420 a month. In 2021 my rent is $1,610 a month. According to the published inflation numbers my rent has gone down because it should be $1,672 if accounting for inflation.

I don't live in California-- maybe things are different there-- but I don't buy the conspiracy theories about inflation numbers.

In 2009 my rent was $550 in Pittsburgh. I just looked and today the same unit is going for $980, a 78% increase. According to published inflation numbers that should be a 23.5% increase to $679 today. So at least from our two examples we can see the effect is not evenly distributed.

edit: incidentally, in 2009 the minimum wage was $7.25, and my rent would have been 47% of my gross income. Today the minimum wage is still $7.25 and if I had stayed at the same apartment at the same wage, my rent would be 84% of my gross income.

On average rents have doubled since 2006, but yes this varies from place to place. Not just in big cities though, it’s been in both cities & rural areas around me in Ohio as an example.

Or maybe everyone who has been having this experience is posting about it, because otherwise there's nothing to post about.

This is an obvious and simple explanation yes but I think it’s only part of the story. CPI numbers are brought down by considering a lot of non-essential goods while almost everything you actually need — food, shelter, healthcare in particular has gotten considerably more expensive. So the sentiment is exacerbated by the fact that nobody really cares whether TVs etc are getting cheaper in their day to day lives.

Given that there's been a massive shift in allocation of spending due to the pandemic I would take any claims like this with a now expensive grain of salt. Let's not forget at the start of the pandemic toilet paper was going for $1 a roll.

this.

presentation bias is everywhere.

The "basket of goods" they use to measure inflation is purposefully gamed to under represent purchases everyone makes weekly that are "volatile". But good news is that DVD players are cheaper than ever so inflation must be low!

Fuel, which isn't purchased as often since the pandemic started has maintained its CPI weighting and has gone down dramatically however.

Inflation is one of those things where if it's clearly stated as being extremely high can risk a lot of followon effects as everyone divests themselves of any direct monetary assets.

Care to cite evidence of this conspiracy?

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