Oddbean new post about login | logout What inflation metric do you use? It makes a massive difference. The equivalent of $100 from 1994 is: CPI: $207 % of M2: $623 I define inflation as printing money. M2 isn't perfect, but it shows that we've had much more value stolen from our money than most think.
I use the price of bottled single serving soda.
how do you factor in the soda quality decrease?
I think it's helpful to look at the monetary supply inflation along with the costs of goods that I actually plan on buying in the future. Monetary inflation doesn't effect the price of everything equally or at the same speed, as the state manipulates the prices of everything differently.
and technologically induced deflation affects some things more than others
Yep. Prices condense a insane amount of information into just a few digits.
TVs would be negative priced if they did do the inflation tho
Food, especially meat
where do you buy meat?
There's a farm a town over that has bison 😋
hell yes. was gonna ask about measuring quality decrease, but you don't see much of that.
I used a mars bar, disregarding all their cost saving and rationalisation of supply chains and reduction of ingredient quality, taking account of shrinkflation, inflation was 4%, which worked out at the value of the currency being cut in 3 over the past 30 years. And the present cpi low So they only have to give you a minimal pay rise…..
I use the chapwood index for back of the napkin calculations, but I also created a budget that prices categories (i.e. mortgage, bills, food, etc.) in sats. The real inflation is in that data. I plan on doing an average of this year over year.
Recently came across another interesting perspective on inflation: nostr:note13j7pxq3fhu3e4p87pm5atmafn78kg0al6hwdevq6g7t70kld3tjqzayh3z