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Comment by vikingerik | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Don't look at year-over-year numbers, you're falling for the illusion. A rent jump of 20% for 2022 is because rents were artificially suppressed in 2020 and 2021.

The right comparison is to look at 2022 compared to 2019 and see if it looks out of line for a three-year period. A few things are, but most aren't.

Also, citing one grocery chain is a cherry-picked outlier. Cite them all if you want a real number and not an artificial illusion.

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This line of thought doesn't stand up to scrutiny when you look at real data. According to the USDA ERS food price outlook reports @ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook/ the 20 year average percent change year on year is something like 2.0% - 2.5%. The change from sept. 2021 to sept 2022 has been 11.2%. The forecasted change in 2022 is approximately 10%. The foretasted change in 2023 is approximately 3.5%. This is dramatically more than just delayed increases from a strange year.

Don't worry, @vikingerik will continue to double down.

Prices of used cars:

https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/price-trends/

...you can select the start date for the chart as early as August of 2010. Price increases starting in late 2020 don't look illusory to me.

This is pretty obvious knock on effect of the pandemic too. Inflation isn't making it so that every new car is selling at or above MSRP currently.

I suppose it matters whether you consider inflation a cause or an effect?

I think that is a good point, and one of the reasons this inflationary period seems to be so widely misunderstood and contentious. We just spent over 2 years dealing with a pandemic, there will be side effects caused by the pandemic as well as the solutions to ease its impact.

In regard to car prices, I would say that the prices themselves contribute to the inflation statistics, but they are not caused by inflationary pressure.

rent did not go down in 2020

It went down significantly in 2021 for me. Though it popped back up a lot in 2022 if we signed a new lease (did not).

That is _not_ exactly what you are talking about: food prices do not normally go up 24% a year. Rent prices do not normally go up 10-15% a year.

If their number is cherry-picked, give a real number yourself. Anecdotally, my grocery bills are easily 30%+ from what they were last year, and the same is true for many people I've asked.

That's still what I'm talking about. Any number you're looking at that's "in a year" is falling victim to the time-shifted demand effects from the pandemic.

Compare 2022 to 2019 and look for the average change over three years. That's the real signal over the temporary noise. There are still some real effects, but it's much smaller than all the one-year-over-year numbers seem to indicate.

This doesn't make sense. How can cost of groceries be up 30% over a three year period be normal. That would leave everyone starving within a decade, and obviously can't be right. Same with the rent increases.

It would not leave everyone starving because salaries go up too, 10% inflation does exist. Argentina deals with 100% yearly inflation and has not blown up yet.

Salaries arnt going up that much. McDonald's near me is still offering 12.50. At best the people in these places got a few more dollars an hour

I’m not speaking about your particular scenario but about situations where inflation is actually more than 10% over several years. Salaries always lag, but they don’t remain at 0% increase. The post I’m replying to said that if inflation was 10% a year in food, everyone would starve in 10 years, and it’s simply not true.

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