A $100k Prize for a Decentralized Inflation Dashboard
1729.com
1729.com
Taking everything into account it seems that real inflation is higher than reported, and it might not be possible to measure it correctly by just tracking prices.
Futures markets are a good example, steel, lumber, cattle, etc...
http://www.historicdoors.co.uk/blog/old-growth-wood-better-n...
Meanwhile digital content and communication services have become free and ubiquitous. Free goods don't get priced at all. This means some categories may have lower than headline inflation. Can you imagine what a pre-internet era company would have been able to charge for an Amazon Echo style device that played any song you asked it to, controlled your home and estimated your drive time? Amazon practically gives them away for free. You don't even have to pay for Prime.
Moreover, the healthcare plan that many people's employers buy on their behalf has accounted for a growing portion of overall compensation. Healthcare in US is so distorted that it barely has a measurable signal for price/service, and yet in the US it consumes 1/6 of GDP. Since many people's employers pay for this, it doesn't factor into the consumer price index.
College tuition? It's up 2-5X in the past 20 years. Fine, we can measure the cost of tuition increases, but does it take into account the interest payments on the student loan debt that, for some, exceed the original loan by a factor of 5-10X? (I don't actually know).
This is just to agree that measuring inflation is really tricky, especially in an age of accelerating technological advancement and institutional failure.
Another one is mobile phone service. Does any remember pay-per-text plans? My phone bill has been more or less than same for a decade, but I now have unlimited call, text, and data.
My first car was 1988 Pontiac Sunbird from my parents. Inflation adjusted price is 26,000 in 2021 dollars.
I had one of the cooler cars in high school. If you look up a picture of it now, it is such a piece of shit I literally would not get in one.
Everyone complains about education cost but I take whatever classes I want online for free from some of the best Universities to have ever existed.
There is always someone that says this obviously ludicrously over simplistic statement that inflation is money printing and then cherry picks data that backs that up. Even though it is just as easy to cherry pick data that shows that point is stupid.
We can't measure "inflation" in the general sense because we have no definition of what that even really means.
Many of the bells and whistles on cars should decrease its value as compared to a 90s car because it drastically increases repair costs.
This isn't going to be a popular take, and I have no love lost for Academia (see my post history). But...
College tuition has the same effect as vehicles: they've gotten more expensive over time, but the quality of the product has massively improved from a consumer's perspective.
1. Education: students have way more support now than they did 20 years ago, or especially 40 years ago. It's quite hard to over-state how much more support students are given today. This is especially true at places with higher tuition, such as LACs or elite universities. It's REALLY HARD to not make it through a four year degree these days, and failure modes typically involve some sort of violent crime or substance abuse disorder. And that's true even for canonically hard fields. With a small handful of exceptions, "weeder courses" don't really exist anymore. And even where they do, there's considerable hand-holding.
2. Housing: dorms these days are still way over-priced relative to what you can get in the private market, but quite nice compared to what was available 30+ years ago.
3. Amenities. This is probably the largest. Students have access to world-class gym facilities -- the type that you can't even buy outside of large cities. Rock walls, huge pools, full weight lifting gyms, yoga studios, squash courts, tennis courts, cheap/free fitness classes, etc. all within a 5 minute walk of your bed.
A lot of the increase in the price of college is attributable to the product becoming much "better" -- it's never been easier to get a degree and dorm list has never been more comfortable.
These are all functions that can be served equally well by an inanimate object. Why pay someone $25/hr every night to say where a dish was sourced when you can just add a couple of lines to the description of that item on your website? I'd definitely have a much better experience if that money was spent on better ingredients, or just not spent and reducing the cost of my meal.
> Maybe that’s not your thing
There's no maybe about it, but I don't think it affects my point.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/07/06/1012409112/bew...
No thanks
Is it, though? Are hotels and used cars more expensive this year because of money printing?
in this piece it looks like the author is making the tautological version of the claim, by following up and describing it as "a function of money printing" — which is obviously true it is a function of money printing and several other things
A decade ago the money printed was to restore bank cash reserves. The inflation had already happened (housing bubble) due to poor lending practices which caused the global financial crisis.
this money machine goes brrrr reality is a poor mans understanding of central bank financing and is mostly a paranoia fueling cryptocurrency speculation.
there is a need for more transparency in inflation numbers, but really, you have to be paranoid of governments numbers to think they arnt sufficiently independent.
How can you monetize this? The whole point is that the data is public for everyone to see?
* offer integrations into various relevant systems
* ability to build custom baskets and/or change the weighting of different categories
What's your moat here? What's preventing a competitor from using the blockchain data you published to make their own product?
>* ability to build custom baskets and/or change the weighting of different categories
Considering that the data is public, that seems easy to do. See also: above comment about moats.
Obviously this is not a billion dollar idea, but it sure could bring in some $ to pay for a full-time developer or two and still make a little profit.
Then a big corp comes up with their own offering and steamrolls you with their lower prices, integration with their existing products, and better engineering/sales staff. See for instance, mongodb and elasticsearch.
I expect if you can help people/financial advisors understand their future expenditure needs there is a lot of value in it.
but the BLS puts out figures for each category? https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t02.htm
I’m not that familiar with USA inflation but with Canadian inflation statistics, certain categories feel way off - such as housing. As someone who is considering buying a house their measure is useless.
BLS numbers are also controversial - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/consumerpriceindex....
Because it's based off "owners equivalent rent", not the sticker price of a house. The latter is somewhat problematic because a house is an investment, not an expenditure (unlike an apple or a doctor visit).
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/62f0014m/62f0014m2017001...
This is difficult for me to understand as there is no market price for what they are trying to estimate. They have a thousand knobs to guess at. It reads a bit like they are grouping people who’ve own their home for 50 years in with those who just bought - similar to how they calculate rent.
For example, they weight mortgage interest at less than utilities. For a new homeowner, mortgage interest is probably 5-10x utilities.
Regardless, they explicitly ignore the experience of a first time home buyer, who are pretty trapped into renting. A house is not just an investment, it’s a different experience owning versus renting.
>[...] For a new homeowner, mortgage interest is probably 5-10x utilities.
Sounds like you're upset that the index is an average of everyone, and therefore doesn't recognize your individual struggles?
>A house is not just an investment, it’s a different experience owning versus renting.
Eating food grown yourself is a different experience than shopping at the supermarket. Should we factor farm land cost into the CPI?
> Eating food grown yourself is a different experience than shopping at the supermarket. Should we factor farm land cost into the CPI?
If 70% of the population paid for a "gardening experience" like they do for gym memberships, etc then yeah I would expect that to be in CPI.
What I feel is that mortgage payments have doubled in 10 years for new buyers. However, because new buyers are a small fraction of existing buyers this doesn't rapidly affect inflation as they calculate it.
Thanks for trying to explain it, I feel pretty dumb as I'm clearly missing something obvious.
The other thing is the cost of the house itself, not the housing services. This includes the purchasing cost and the cost of repairs that you make periodically. The repairs are not a problem but the purchasing cost would need to be spread over the useful life of the house. If the house is bought on credit then the buyer will also incur funding costs (i.e. in the form of interest payments), but these can't be considered costs that are related to housing. They are separate. It's like if you buy a car on credit you'll pay more than if you paid for it with your savings, but that doesn't mean the car is more expensive.
CPI includes housing services and repairs. As far as I know, it doesn't include houses, probably because they're considered an investment good, while CPI is concerned with consumer goods. At any rate, mortgage payments are not a good estimate of how much houses cost. The reasons are interest, which is a different cost, and the fact that principal payments are arbitrary as they vary depending on things like mortgage length, and so on.
Anyway, I understand that many people feel strongly about CPI and inflation measurements, but while cost accounting is not rocket science it's not completely straightforward either, and most of the time criticism of CPI by layman people turns out to be misguided.
> Every month, the rental prices paid by the households in the sample are compared with the rental prices they paid the previous month
When rent control caps rent increases this becomes a lagging indicator. Why don't they try to estimate market rent?
This feels similar to my problem with the owner cost estimate. Consider a hypothetical about cars - in a world where everyone buys new cars with 8 years of financing, suddenly there is a car shortage (chips or whatever). The price of a new car doubles. As very few owners need to buy a new car every year, on average their costs are about the same as last year despite a 100% increase in the cost of a new car.
If you live in Vancouver, it's easy to forget 93% of the country doesn't.
From 1995 to just pre-pandemic, my home (in the US, far away from California) appreciated significantly less than inflation.
> That’s why we named 1729.com after Ramanujan’s number. Ramanujan made great contributions to India and to mathematics around the world. He was particularly renowned for his contribution to number theory, which underpins cryptography and hence crypto. And he represented something I’ve been thinking about for many years, which is how to use technology to help the dark talent in India and around the world rise as Ramanujan did. Thus the fourth task is to help identify those people and places where the best is outside the West, where the ascending world is surpassing the declining world.
$100k for a dev in India, Ukraine, or Venezuela, is more than enough incentive.
People really need diverse items: they need food, but also real estate, the prices of which are going through the roof currently, and that's a form of inflation. Also, there are many profiles of consumption. People have different needs.
I'd say that it could be a 100 floating point vector; with the first 40 values arranged by increasing importance on Maslow's pyramid of human needs; 20 for consumption pattern diversity; and 40 for future consumption needs, initially set to 0, to be added at the rate of 1 every 5 years.
How do you get people to agree on which profile? I have a feeling it'll end up like the various unemployment statistics U-1 through U-6, ie. "you're a fool if you believe unemployment is at x% (U-3), the real unemployment rate is y% (your choice of U1/2/4/5/6, depending on the picture you want to paint)"
Take these examples:
- The housing market is extremely diverse in certain countries, where some cities have experience price increases the past decades, some have been stagnating, and some have seen price decreases.
- Same goes for salaries. In extremely centralized cities, there's likely been above inflation rise, while in extremely decentralized cities, salaries have been stagnating, sometimes just standing still.
- Fuel prices can depend on local policies and taxation laws.
- Foods etc. can depend on how far away the places are in the logistical chain, how many competitors there are in the area, how the stores and chains are organized, etc.
- Travel (airfare, trains, etc.) can depend on location. Some larger hubs have experienced airfare that's become cheaper and cheaper with years, while rural places have seen the same going up.
Just in my country (Norway), there are hundreds of towns and villages with prices that are all over the place, and you'd need to scrape thousands of websites. Some of the data would be more or less impossible to get, due to the data never being digitized to begin with.
Of course, I would love to have such a database ready. I'd love to be able to run a query on my home town, and see what the prices for top 10 items were, say, 45 years ago. And compare that to the national inflation, as well as local prices of the more expensive cities.
So I think that whomever is going to work on this, probably just need to take the very rough and general (historical) inflation rates, which most government websites offer. To make a DB which accounts for all the micro- and macro changes would just be too consuming for any small team. You'd basically need a Wikipedia-esque team of individual contributors to cover all the prices.
The prices would ideally come from a large number of sources and some averaging would take place.
[0] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2021/07/1...
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
What makes you think a NGO would do a better job? On one hand they might not have the same incentive to manipulate the numbers in the same way that the government would, but that would be replaced with an incentive to come up with whatever numbers that their donor base would like to see (see also: media companies adjusting their coverage to retain subscribers).
>If you look at the constituents [0], housing, education and health care make up around 60%, so it makes no sense that inflation has been flat for the last ten years.
Are you missing a part of your argument here? You just say that a few categories make up 60% of the CPI, then immediately conclude that "it makes no sense that inflation has been flat".
>The prices would ideally come from a large number of sources and some averaging would take place.
The problem is that you need to do various subjective adjustments (eg. the controversial "hedonistic adjustments") for the numbers to make sense.
Maybe they wouldn't do better, but they wouldn't have a trillion dollar incentive and ideally there'd be competing metrics.
> Are you missing a part of your argument here? You just say that a few categories make up 60% of the CPI, then immediately conclude that "it makes no sense that inflation has been flat".
In the US, over the last 10 years housing, education and health care have grown by a lot while official inflation has been historically very flat (0 - 2%).
Health care: On a per capita basis, health spending has increased over 31-fold in the last four decades, from $353 per person in 1970 to $11,582 in 2019. [0]
Housing: Median home price was around ~210k in today's dollars ten years ago and is now ~314k [1]
Education: The cost of college increased by more than 25% in the last 10 years [2]
> The problem is that you need to do various subjective adjustments
Sure, but again, I don't trust the officials to do this given the trillion dollar incentive to fudge the numbers.
[0] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe....
[1] https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/13/cost-of-college-increased-by...
The fact that no private entities tried to do anything similar (eg. bloomberg, s&p, msci) despite the massive incentive to do so (it's hard to price bonds/mortgages/loans if you can't trust the inflation numbers), suggests that the current number is already pretty good and/or that coming up with comparable numbers would be massively expensive. I think the problem is of expectations. You want a competitor to the BBC. You hope that it'll be something like propublica, but given the crowd associated with crypto, you'll probably end up with something like zerohedge.
>Health care: On a per capita basis, health spending has increased over 31-fold in the last four decades, from $353 per person in 1970 to $11,582 in 2019. [0]
That seems pretty consistent with the figures from CPI: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SAM2
From 1999 to 2019, the source you gave (Total national health expenditures, US $ per capita) 154% increase. The "Medical Care Services" component of the CPI grew by 112% in the same time period. The figure you gave also doesn't account for an aging population (older people spend more on healthcare, irrespective of cost), so the "true" difference is probably smaller.
>Housing: Median home price was around ~210k in today's dollars ten years ago and is now ~314k [1]
Because looking at home prices is a poor way of assessing housing cost increases. If you factor in falling interest rates, the cost of a house has actually gone down. Houses have also gotten bigger and better equipped in the last few decades, which might increase the overall sticker price, but arguably shouldn't contribute to CPI increase.
see: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/03/what-if-housing-pri...
>Education: The cost of college increased by more than 25% in the last 10 years [2]
The "Tuition, Other School Fees, and Childcare" component of the CPI has increased 37.4% in the same time period.
> That seems pretty consistent with the figures from CPI:
CPI 1970: 31.1 CPI 2021: 570.6 Increase: 570/31 = 18-fold compared to 31-fold. Don't just say "looks similar" when you could do simple division and realize it's not similar. I don't think there is a single economist that would argue that health care spending has not grown considerably faster than the rate of inflation.
Here's the continuously compounded rate of growth of health expenditures as per the st louis fed
DATE HLTHSCEXPHCSA_CCH
1/1/01 8.61255
1/1/02 8.53011
1/1/03 6.8683
1/1/04 7.1269
1/1/05 6.22677
1/1/06 6.17762
1/1/07 6.12021
1/1/08 4.61058
1/1/09 4.60561
1/1/10 3.86769
1/1/11 3.5515
1/1/12 3.53598
1/1/13 2.54628
1/1/14 5.1474
1/1/15 6.26148
1/1/16 5.01743
1/1/17 3.98121
1/1/18 4.16224
You can do the same for housing [1]
1. you're thinking that the index would have to be integrated into the product itself (eg. this bond pays s&p inflation index + 2%) for it to be useful. This isn't the case. Even for forecasting or internal rate-setting purposes it would be massively useful.
2. If you check the website for s&p or msci, they got an endless list of indexes. Some of them are even integrated into financial products (eg. tracked by ETF or derivatives). Exotic indexes is definitely not a problem for them.
>I don't think there is a single economist that would argue that health care spending has not grown considerably faster than the rate of inflation.
I think the problem here is that you're conflating per-capita spending with price increase. As mentioned earlier an aging population would increase per-capita spending without necessarily increasing price. People opting to buy better, but more expensive care would also increase per-capita spending without necessarily increasing price.
>You can do the same for housing [1]
What's your contradictory source for the actual price of housing?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project
[2] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54491
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristina_Fernández_de_Kirchn...
Once done, it could be useful to make an oracle with it and put it on ethereum so it can be used by other smart contracts. But not the calculation itself nor the original data points
Browsers should prevent pushing to history if I haven’t clicked.
I don't get it, why cause inflation purposely?
That said, I'm all for this because it would be cool.
The flip side to this notion is that if someone stands to profit from inflation, they're incentivized to promote discussion of inflation with the hope of increasing it. Would anyone in the blockchain space stand to profit from the US dollar's demise?
Ill pass on that shoehorned scope
Additionally, Chainlink has offered an additional $100k grant in LINK tokens if the best dashboard uses their crypto oracle technology.2. This seems worth way more than 100k & they just want multiple teams working on it (competing), so they can then invest 100k in a company? This seems incredibly underfunded.
All monetary distortion (including inflation) translates into economic distortion (suboptimal allocation and waste).
People mistake cause and effect in economics all the time. Inflation can be a good proxy for money velocity. But it can also just be a proxy for growth of money supply. In the former, it’s often a sign of economic activity/growth. In the latter, it’s often a sign of stagflation.
The US seems closer to stagflation at the moment. The Fed have an opportunity to nip this in the bud and deflate their balance sheet, but they won’t.
Sounds like it'll be cheaper to buy the data off one of those receipt scanning apps. Better reach, and you don't need to make your own data acquisition/validation pipeline.
I don't get it. Tell them what to buy? The official figures are based on a basket determined by surveying people. That is the point. It sounds like you are saying the problem with the government CPI is that it's not predetermined?
"The Quarterly Interview Survey is designed to collect data on large and recurring expenditures that consumers can be expected to recall for a period of 3 months or longer, such as rent and utilities, and the Diary Survey is designed to collect data on small, frequently purchased items, including most food and clothing. Together, the data from the two surveys cover the complete range of consumers’ expenditures."
The nth taxicab number, also called the nth Hardy–Ramanujan number, is the smallest integer that can be expressed as a sum of two positive integer cubes in n distinct ways. The most famous taxicab number is 1729.