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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24901 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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I think this is a false equivalence. Crime stats are about broad groups, not individuals (e.g. "Black men in America"). Even if you are a black man in America with a lived experience, it is impossible to have the lived experience of all black men in America as a collective whole. Thus, you can use lived experience to say "I have been victimized by a police officer," and most reasonable people would accept that, but you cannot use lived experience to say "all black men are victimized by all police officers."

But inflation is about the experience of individuals, not groups. No one is out there saying that inflation disproportionately affects Muslims because the CPI is racist (OK I'm sure someone somewhere is saying that, but I don't care.) A single individual can experience the effects of inflation on their personal food budget without needing to make any claims about the experiences of others. An individual saying "food costs more than it used to" is exactly what inflation is, and exactly what inflation statistics are supposed to measure. If the statistics don't match the experience, then the statistics are wrong.

Moreover, the same government agencies that purport to measure inflation have a pretty big incentive to say that inflation isn't a problem, since inflation reflects badly on the government that signs their paychecks. Not only would we expect them to downplay inflation, we've watched them do it in real time with claims about inflation* being low where inflation* is calculated to exclude food, rent, and education.

In the latter case, it's not just that the sticker price of food has increased, which it certainly has, it's whether it's increased grossly disproportionate to the increase of wages. And even then, as others have shown, the cost of food is a minuscule portion of most individual budgets unless they're really addicted to DoorDash.

As mentioned in my other comment, the problem is that food, while a comparatively small portion of the budget, is one of the only parts that is highly flexible. This means that food, and a few other flexible spends, bear all the weight of the lost money from the inflexible spends increasing in price. This adds a sort of salt-in-the-wound effect when the food is more expensive as well. I think this is a big part of why people fixate on food prices in particular.

It's not miniscule. It has a weight of 13.380%, which puts it as the third largest category of spending (Shelter, then "Commodities less food and energy commodities").

That's small enough I have no shame in calling it miniscule, but YMMV.

An individual saying "food costs more than it used to" is exactly what inflation is, and exactly what inflation statistics are supposed to measure. If the statistics don't match the experience, then the statistics are wrong.

Not necessarily:

  1. The person might live in a particular geographic location which has particularly bad inflation.
  2. The person might suffer selective outrage, noticing the prices that have risen the most, but ignoring products whose prices have remained flat, and ignoring that if you actually average them all out they do match the government numbers.
  3. The person might have specific shopping habits that don't match those of the average consumer.
  4. The inflation on particular product SKU's often exceeds CPI inflation as corporations try to sneak by price increases on lazy existing customers, while giving discounted prices to new customers. So you see the product list price go up and think high inflation. But maybe you forgot about that time you called your cable company, threatened to cancel, got your SKU slightly changed, and are actually are paying the same as you were three years ago for a bundle that is just as satisfactory. And when you average it all out, the actually increase in what you pay is not as high as the increase in the list price.

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