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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

That's missing forest for the trees. The more important part is that average 3.7 people household was a single-income one.

I would rather disagree with GP's:

> My point is that inflation isn’t abstract and it isn’t a law of nature. It’s a deliberate approach to stealing your prosperity while you cheer it on.

A lot of the inflation, including how suddenly a single-income household isn't a viable option for most people in the West, is market working as intended - quickly consuming any surplus money, should it suddenly become greater than 0 on average, and slowly eating into any value that isn't bare-minimum strictly necessary to move a product.

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> That's missing forest for the trees. The more important part is that average 3.7 people household was a single-income one.

That's not necessarily true. Per FRED (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRAC25FEUSM156S), in 1963 about 44% of women aged 25-55 were in the workforce. That's obviously much lower than the ≈96% rate for men, but it implies that the average couple had closer to 1.4 incomes. The comparable rate based on today's labour force participation rates would be about 1.66 incomes.

The single-income family may have been the norm, but it was far from a rule. I think that our popular perception of life in the 60s has been filtered through media portrayals, which all tend to reinforce ideals as commonplace norms.

What's the definition of 'in the work force'

Is a child with a paper route 'in the work force?'

You are also assuming that 100% of those 44% were in a relationship.

We just dont know what % of those were single mothers, widows, divorcees or single women, etc.

44% of women were not working full-time

I think people are asking the wrong questions when it comes to inflation. It's not which president is at fault... It's who is profiting from it? It's not the minimum wage worker. It's not the standard office worker.

What class has shown absolutely insane growth in wealth and income in the face of what looks like crippling inflation?

Your standard office worker probably refinanced their mortgage at ~3% and is now laughing their way to the bank as their debt inflates away so they probably are profiting from it. I know I am.

Your standard retiree on the other hand who holds a lot of bonds that got absolutely hammered by inflation and rising interest rates is not doing so well.

That only works if you’re income rises faster than inflation, otherwise the relative amount of debt either remains the same or even increases.

Investment income absolutely has

That 3% rate was plowed into a property whose price was inflated by exactly the amount that the 3% rate discounted the cost of money.

The only party "profiting" from inflation is the government which controls the money supply. If you keep the money supply constant, no one profits from inflation; inflation merely reflects supply and demand of the constant money supply vs all other goods and services on the market. Inflation does not reflect capital that is accumulated and taken off the market.

When I worked a lot with government this used to be a big problem. Some minor tangential point in a finding would be slighty off or not adequately supported and people would jump on that, ignore the rest and pretend it invalidated the whole argument. It's mainly something that comes up talking to insecure bureaucrats that don't want to change.

> That's missing forest for the trees.

However, when a person is making a post saying "don't trust those dodgy manipulated numbers" and offering alternative numbers, their post is a lot less convincing if their numbers are also dodgy

I didn’t get they said the numbers were dodgy or manipulated. Don’t make the typical straw man when discussing inflation that people challenging the current formula for CPI are challenging the underlying data and so are conspiracists. The point is the relevance of the indicator. In fact the very article is about a different value if we take an older formula.

A number can be dodgy and manipulated without being outright fraudulent. And in politics it's rare someone will outright lie - I'm sure you've heard the term "lies, damn lies and statistics".

For example, during the pandemic the UK government set itself a target for covid testing, then proudly announced that they'd hit their target - but it turned out they were not counting the number of tests processed in labs but instead the number of test kits sent out by mail regardless of whether they were received, returned, or processed - allowing them to declare success before increasing lab capacity. It's not outright fraudulent, but it's questionable and errs in a politically convenient direction - that's a dodgy number.

And as I understand it, the claim in this discussion is that the government changed the definition of inflation, in a way that made the number lower? And that it now doesn't accurately reflect what it purports to reflect?

Sounds like dodgy manipulated numbers to me.

It's not the market that's eating the "surplus". Economic inequality is at an all time high. Big corporations are posting record-busting profits. Inflation is driven by greedflation, mostly.

Corporations aren't natural persons. You have to look a the in/equity of the wealth of the people who enjoy the corporation's money.

Did you think I was claiming the corporations themselves were hoarding the wealth? Did it not occur to you that I was referring to the corporations as the tools of the shareholders? Do I really have to be that explicit and include misquotation alerts for every possible idiot?

Cops have been greedy and tried to extract max cash always, its just now people pay it

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