Meaningless crap, designed to support government narrative that everything is great, nothing to see here.
To have any credibility at all, inflation MUST include rent/mortgage payments and house prices.
(food and beverages, housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, education and communication, and other goods and services)
Question 10. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm
RPI takes into account housing costs such as mortgage interest payments, building insurance etc. I'm not sure what USA measure, but the UK shifted to CPI in 2003 to harmonise with EU.
So no, UK/EU/CPI inflation measures basically don't include housing related costs. Certainly not the price of houses, which might be the thrust of OPs point.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/blog/2021/09/09/housing-price...
You can bet every HN thread about inflation will be full of bad info from cranks.
Basically, if the cost of housing is rising, but the quality of housing is also rising, then these things will offset to a degree as far as CPI is concerned.
It’s one of the reasons healthcare inflation is so absurdly underrepresented. CPI basically assumes that you could pick any level of quality for a good or a service since the index inception. But you can’t go to a hospital and say “I just have a small cut on my finger, I’d like the 1950s level of care”…you will get the 2021 level of care and 2021 prices. But CPI will say “ah that’s not necessarily inflation because the quality of care has also gone up!”
But it’s worth pointing out that certain agencies use CPI imperfections when it suits them: the Fed has pointed to low inflation for years as justification to continue its monetary policies. And then when CPI no longer backs their actions, they change the narrative and claim it’s “transitory”.
CPI isn’t broken. It can’t be broken. It’s just a metric with a methodology.
But our interpretation of CPI is broken at best, and manipulative at worst.