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Notes -
Hedonic adjustments, fake and gay?
There's been a lot of talk about a U.S. "vibecession" lately. In the last couple of years, incomes have risen, unemployment remains minuscule, the stock market is roaring, and inflation has returned to normal levels. Yet, when polled, Americans remain gloomy about the state of economy. What gives? Why aren't we partying like it's 1999?
The usual suspects are out as usual, telling us to ignore our lying eyes, pointing at charts, and saying ackchually, the economy is doing quite well thank you very much.
I don't think so.
Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary and consummate insider, had this to say:
"We show that if we make an effort to reconstruct the CPI of Okun’s era [1970s]—which would have had inflation peak last year around 18%, we are able to explain 70% of the gap in consumer sentiment we saw last year."
18% annual inflation is quite a lot. The official number peaked at only 9%.
Of course, none of this is news. People have been complaining about inflation numbers being fake for awhile now. A can of Campbell's soup cost $0.40 in 2000, but rose to $1.23 by 2023. That implies an annual inflation rate of 5%, vs. the official number of only 2.5%. And while this is just a single product, similar patterns have held true among other immutable products like gasoline or Coca-Cola.
On the other hand, there are hedonic adjustments. Unlike a Campbell's soup can, a TV in 2023 was nothing like a TV in 2000. It's better in nearly every way. So even though a family might still spend $500 to buy a TV, the quality has increased by 10x, so the price had reduced by 90%. Or something.
You can easily see how inflation numbers get fuzzy. One thing I don't think CPI is taking into account is the degradation in the quality of services post-pandemic. The price of an HVAC repair is skyrocketing. But the quality is plumetting. Does CPI measure that? Do they measure being guilted for tips at fast food restaurants and convenience stores? Do they measure waiting in line at the pharmacy for 45 minutes because there is only one harried pharmacist on duty? Do they measure being bombarded with ads where previously there were none. Do they adjust (up or down) when TikTok becomes 5% more addictive? I doubt it.
Nor could they. I doubt any of this can be measured.
And so we return to the can of soup and opinion polls. Maybe they're not such a bad measure of inflation after all. And I think they will show what many of us feel intuitively: that the economy is doing a lot worse than the official numbers show.
Completely uninformed speculation, but could it just be a holdover from when inflation was extremely high? Cost of living went up faster than many could adjust to; they never got used to it. And it's still going up! The fact that people don't notice the deceleration could be attributed to confirmation bias. Whenever they notice that something has gone up in price, it's "See, the prices really are going up still! And they would have me believe I'm imagining things." They're probably better at noticing price increases now too, anecdotally quite a few people in my circles track them more deliberately than before.
It's similar to how critics of the establishment sometimes allege that announcements that "Inflation has gone down" are misleading. I personally am not misled, but a small part of me might be unconsciously translating "Inflation has gone down" to "Inflation is under control", which it doesn't feel like it is, because prices still seem unreasonably high.
As for why we would be especially prone now to such a post-inflation vibecession, maybe it has something to do with the fact that millennials, who have outsize influence on the vibe economy (on social media), saw the highest inflation rates of their lifetimes through most of 2021, all of 2022, and the first half of 2023, and at least through the remainder of 2023 inflation stayed well above what they'd typically experienced in the preceding 15 years.
I think one thing about inflation that I don't see people factoring in is that the wage growth that is usually a part of it usually lags behind. But another part is that it usually doesn't just happen for free. It doesn't happen that your boss one day up and decides to give you a 10% raise unprompted—especially if you are highly replaceable. So the everyman experiences inflation in a much more tactile way. It isn't the case that the growth of their savings slows as the appreciation of their assets quickens and it all kind of vaguely evens out with plenty of liquid lubricant to ease the whole thing, like it does for someone like me.
To the guy working retail, inflation is that months-long period of time where everything gets prohibitively expensive and they either have to fight their boss for a sizeable raise they probably won't get and then go looking for a better job where at best they have to spend months of extra effort (of which they likely do not have in large supply) relearning a new job and settling into new routines only to at best vaguely catch up to where they were before.
This, to put it simply, sucks—and it's likely the case based on the bad vibes that this adjustment period isn't over. It also may very well follow a resentment period. I don't know where stuff like this would show up in highly coarse macroeconomic numbers, and my guess is that it probably doesn't.
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