The government changes their reporting mechanism all the time. If you use the 90s standards it is closer to 10% (15% using the 80s standard).
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
This is occasionally mentioned in the news:
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
This is occasionally mentioned in the news:
1. Take ShadowStasts claimed inflation (dig, you'll find their historical graph), which they generally have much higher than BLS rates, and take BLS rates, and compute the compounded inflation over say 20-30 years.
2. Pick a decent batch of things you buy: housing, rent, food, gas, cars, etc. (making your basket of goods - scale according to what you spend on them, like a normal basket of goods would do)
3. Find ads from now and from the start of the timeframe. Gather prices. Put in Excel or Google Docs
4. See which is more accurate: BLS or ShadowStats.
5. Conclude ShadowStats is absolute nonsense, and ban it from your thinking, since you just proved to yourself it is nonsense. Reading it makes one significantly less connected to demonstrable reality.
The first time I did this it was amazing how far ShadowStats was from reality. I've been recommending this to friends for years - most realized what nonsense it is and learned to see if there's simple ways to check things themselves. And this is an easy test anyone can do with a little effort.
Amusingly, highly educated people who are disdainful of anti-vaxers or Gwyneth Paltrow quackery can easily believe that inflation is an order of magnitude higher than officially reported, or that they the evil/incompetent bureaucrats leave out food, shelter, healthcare and/or energy costs from the calculation or some such.
As an academic economist turned machine learning/SWE, I'd say there are plenty of knowledgeable people around on HN, but on matters of economics and health, the signal-to-noise is definitely much lower than on anything related to computers.
It's why I love such clean examples as the Shadowstats nonsense. It's completely debunkable in an hours work.
No, I'm serious. If these numbers were accurate then you wouldn't even be able to make money off the stock or housing market. Everyone would be losing money.
The irony of ShadowStats:
> So, here we are 3 years later and the price for a Shadow Stats subscription still hasn’t budged! At $175 for a year long subscription, you still get the same Shadow Stats. The cost of the subscription has remained the same even as inflation has moved higher. So, in real terms, there’s actually been deflation in the cost of a Shadow Stats subscription.
* https://www.pragcap.com/update-theres-still-deflation-in-hyp...
That was written in 2014. It's now (late) 2021 and and the price is still $175. :)
Because this sounds like exactly what's happening.