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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Are those good weights? Do those match the actual spending or preferences of the people whose "vibes" we are deriding?

35% is much larger than 3.07% (by a margin of 11.4:1), which is sufficient to defeat the implicit claim that the "the official inflation measures are broken" because they don't reflect that "Housing prices are more important to most people by a massive margin than the price of cheap consumer crap from China." They do in fact reflect that.

Note "parts of the country that get the top 30% population growth" which is the key. This measures the inflation for new adults who are moving on their own and starting families which is the segment that matters much more than pensioners who have already paid off their houses or living in areas that will have few people in 20 years. It addresses the very common complaint that the wages are no longer enough to buy a reasonable house / apartment even though the official inflation says everything is perfectly fine.

It is one of the few significant parts where the cost is largely determined by policy (ie. city planning, building permits and, if necessary, public projects).

I don't think that would get you the results you expect

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/subcounty-metro-micro-estimates.html

And of course declaring that one particular generation is the only one which matters is not going to be particularly convincing to most.