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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

Not a bad overview, but misses some things

(1) political instability

(2) $10M/home as sticker price wouldn't happen. Apartments and row homes would be more common substitutes (and already have sopped up demand in the starter home markets)

(3) what inflation measures show 10% inflation?

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It emerged in another thread that since the 1950s inflation has averaged 8% a year. Will try to find source...

What utter nonsense. Even not adjusting for improved quality, do you honestly think things cost 220x what they did in the 50s?

Shadowstats[1] shows more than 10% in '80s-based measure.

1. http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

Shadowstats's 80s-based measure says we've been having 10% YoY inflation for two decades now. If that were true, prices would've 5x'ed since the year 2000. That doesn't pass the 'sniff test' to me; e.g. the Big Mac Index [1] says a Big Mac cost $2.50 in 2000 and $5.50 today, equivalent to about 4% YoY inflation.

[1] https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index

It's not the same Big Mac. It's smaller and lower quality.

Check out https://www.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation/ which has posts about products that get smaller.

The same shadowstats just takes BLS CPI and adds a constant to it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27124745

5-10% for many things: tuition, healthcare, cars, homes, transportation, etc.

I don't see political instability ever being much of a problem. Trump was considered 'unstable' by pundits yet prices surged during his term.

> I don't see political instability ever being much of a problem.

Constantly in the political sphere are candidates promising to forgive tuition debt because its so crazy, and politicians promising the government will cover healthcare because its so crazy.

We're not at political instability, but I think we're crossed over into "politicians have to solve this not because its a governments responsibility, but because people can't solve it so they're asking politicians" which is often the first step to instability.

IIRC 15% for Campbells Tomato Soup.

https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-price...

Eyeballing the values on the graph, it looks like the price increase is around 4% YoY between 2000 and 2020, from ~0.40$ to 0.85$. If it were 15%, it would have reached 6.50$ in 2020.

My mistake, I linked the wrong thing. Here is the right one https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-price... .

Well that would be a different story if he did succeed at stealing the election on Jan 6 while having his supporters destroying the Capitol.

The social unrest would have been quite something.

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