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Comment by rzimmerman | Hacker News Reader

It’s really disheartening to see the percentage of people that don’t understand this (and feel perfectly comfortable having an argument about it). People posting comparisons of receipts from 8 years ago and saying that prices are “really still up 30%” and “they’re lying to us”.

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It's very easy to have selection bias. For example, your favorite restaurant might have been cheap when it was under the radar, but then they rose their prices by 30% after they went viral.

Is this just young people? Those of us that lived through the 70s and 80s remember very well how this stuff worked.

Let me assure you that people not understanding extremely basic economics come from all walks of life.

In fact, I was just listening to a random, she must’ve been 60 year old woman and her mother in a waiting room rant about “how is prices going up with inflation going down”.

I’ve been working for 20 odd years now and still have coworkers who started the day I did rant “these fucking forced union wage increases! Don’t they know that I’ll hit a new tax bracket and then take home less money than before!”

These people are 40+ years old. They should know better.

The misconception of tax brackets is also frustrating. Tax brackets are marginal. If a tax bracket cutoff is, say, 10% at 100k, and you cross it to 110k, only 10k is taxed at 10%. The other 100k is taxed as before.

The last 3.5 years have also screwed with peoples' sense of time, it's really common to see measures that normally get compared year-to-year instead get compared to 2019.

Yes. But in fairness, inflation was basically zero for a decade before that. So it's kind of "since inflation (re)started", which makes a kind of sense, even though it's hard to compare to all the reported figures, which are annual.

I see lots of people saying something different, which is the current state of prices doesn't match the rate of inflation we had the past few years.

I'm way more disheartened by people talking about inflation like it's the end all be all of prices. We know what price gouging looks like.

We've had about 20% total inflation since 2021. In some sectors it is higher and some lower. Even Amazon's recent history of price gouging is only going to add up to peanuts on their yearly gross. I think it's more people just don't understand compounding rates and if you inject more dollars into the economy than there are goods and services, you'll have more dollars chasing those same goods and services.

They are lying to us though. Inflation is and was higher than what they're saying it is.

Inflation isn't even across all states. Some states experience higher inflation than the national average.

https://usafacts.org/articles/which-us-regions-have-the-high...

Where is the evidence?

Not OP, but where I _may_ agree with the sentiment is that inflation has a wide distribution of impact by the underlying category of goods/services. e.g. food, energy, electricity, shelter, apparel, etc.

Namely, even if average / median inflation is going down, inflation is still non-zero - and even still very high - in categories that significantly impact lower-income households, urban families, farmers, etc.

Just look at the economists who are calculating inflation using the 80s methodologies and it's been way higher that the public figure.

Casual stroll through the supermarket at OP's neighborhood

> Casual stroll through the supermarket at OP's neighborhood

At which point I’m sure they’re considering their metropolitan statistical area’s figures instead of the national ones. /s

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