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The numbers are heavily manipulated. Very few people, especially in industry, actually look at them. I occasionally talk about accounting and metrics, e.g. imputed rent where the rental value of assets are included in economic growth without actually being measured - accounting for all of these, yearly growth numbers can be greatly reduced. Quality adjustments and awkward exclusions make CPI almost irrelevant - not counting housing/rent at all (while it's imputed to 10% of GDP). Healthcare and insurance are covered by CPI, but in a very distorted way (while this is 20-25% of total GDP... they only include out of pocket expenses, while employer-paid premiums skyrocket ... and are actual compensation, another 1-20% everyone forcibly allocates to the cartel):
In different periods, the proportions of spending vary greatly, e.g. 40% of income on food, 10% on housing, 20% on clothing etc. to 50% housing, 15% food, 20% mandatory car... Inflation calculations do not account for this, but measure the overall basket's change. My company buys people's personal budget histories to see what actual costs and spending habits look like. From my Christian perspective, consumption patterns have grown to 30% sin. From my growth-is-good perspective, people are using less molecules. When it costs millions of dollars to change an electrical pole because of increased bureaucracy, there's no increase in utility but everyone in the community is saddled with more debt.
At the core, utility is about ranking choices, preferences. Unfortunately, our society has shown preference for sin and our system enables wealth-destroying consumption and work-breaking with seductive choices, gambling, easy debt, taxation increases etc.
Describe what you mean by sin. Alcohol? Weed? Netflix subscriptions?
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PCE inflation includes these, and the trends aren't different. CPI actually tends to be higher when inflation spikes.
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