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Comment by orangepurple | Hacker News Reader

Shadowstats is bullshit for a number of reasons - you can read up on most of them on the official articles and publications and justifications on the BLS website -- which are generally written by statisticians with maths or econ PhDs with no vested political interest, unlike Shadowstats which is written by an MBA who needs to sell a newsletter.

But you can very easily debunk Shadowstats by just averaging the ridiculous CPI inflation number postulated by the Shadowstats dude over 2/3/4 decades, and put that compounded rate of 8% into a calculator and multiply it with a wage from 1990 or 2000 or whenever... And see that consumer goods/services can't have increased by that much or otherwise everyone would be destitute...

> on the BLS website

This is begging the question though. If the problem is BLS, then using BLS as a reference that BLS isn't the problem is blatantly fallacious. The claim is that BLS is deceiving us... so it doesn't make any sense to use them to adjudicate whether they're deceiving us or not. You see the problem right?

We know Shadowstats is decieving us because they don't measure inflation, just add numbers to the official inflation numbers. You can read more about it if you google the topic. For example:

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1025266&sid...

In a more pragmatic sense, if you can't be bothered to learn enough economics to evaluate the official number (which is understandable) going with the group that sounds crazy is a bad idea.

This author talks about outside view dismissals being a valid form of evaluating a claim in the context of a cult:

"But the outside view tells you something different. These people are wearing funny robes and beads, they live in a remote compound, and they speak in unison in a really creepy way. Even though their arguments are irrefutable, everything in your experience tells you you're dealing with a cult.

Of course, they have a brilliant argument for why you should ignore those instincts, but that's the inside view talking.

The outside view doesn't care about content, it sees the form and the context, and it doesn't look good."

https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm

No. Because the BLS publishes their methodology, back tests it, and compares it to other weights and methodologies (which they publish full datasets for). You can then compare it to other independent measurements like the MIT Billion Prices Project and see that over an 8-year period, the BLS measurements differ from public pricing info by less than 1% which is less than 1/10th of a percent per year.

http://www.thebillionpricesproject.com/datasets/

There certainly is room for measurement error in something as complex as an inflation index that takes into account so many data points and weights, but the answer to resolve that complexity isn't "trust grifters selling newsletters to goldbugs".

Yes. They didn't refer to the MIT Billion Prices Project, they refereed to BLS itself, to debunk the claim that they "misused cover of academic theory" unlike what you did. You can't just say someone didn't fail epistemically just because you, 10 minutes later, didn't.

Meh, this is just a different form of an ad hominem... There are literally hundreds of pages of documents written about CPI justification and process, and several documents specifically showing how Shadowstats is garbage (e.g. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/08/art1full.pdf).

Take quarrel with the actual research instead of the domain they're hosted on since as OP pointed out, many of them are published by third party academics with no financial or institutional connection to the BLS.

8% YoY would indeed be a comical amount of inflation. I don't believe shadowstats is implying such an increase.

The reason people don't believe the official CPI numbers is because the CPI numbers are not properly weighted for life or dollar impact. If we look from 1970 the price of health care has increased 54x, a new house has increased 19x, and annual tuition has increased 25x. If the price of milk increases 19x what do I care? I'll just stop buying milk. I don't want to stop being alive, I need a place to live, and I want and need an education.

Even the numbers they do include seem gamed or fake. Shelter shows a 6.9% increase year over year, but the price of houses is up 17% over that same period and the price of rent is up 12-30%. I'm sure there is some ling winded explanation for how shelter excludes such and such thing, but it just loudly screams bullshit for many (most?) Americans.

>And see that consumer goods/services can't have increased by that much or otherwise everyone would be destitute...

I think people are pretty destitute to be honest.

Look at the 1980 based graph [0]. They are definitely implying 7-5-10% inflation for the past 25 years.

[0]: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

If you care this much about inflation, you should calculate your own personal inflation rate(PIR). It will be different than CPI, because what you buy and what CPI tracks won't be the same. Regardless, your own personal inflation rate will have actual meaning to you. My PIR in 2021 was 1.6%. So far in 2022 it's gone up to 6.8%.

Sounds like you should put down the Coke. ;-)

I remember when shadowstats started getting popular. Have you actually looked at their numbers? they're obviously way off, inflation is high for sure but according to their numbers a lot of things are 6-7x the price they were a decade ago and that's clearly not true

Shadowstats has fictional data.

This is like earnestly showing the earth is flat by linking to a flat earth web site with fictional data showing the earth is flat.

To be fair, that also describes the official CPI.

Which is going right over the heads of these bots.

It sure is. But I get it, they are trying to hold onto a shared myth.

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