Inflaaaaaaaation

[jimbogumbo]

We been through all this stuff upthread.

You want to claim negative externalitites of fewer children on account of expensive housing? What happened to the population explosion? Fewer humans, less global warming. Positive externalitites.

There are certainly negative externalities: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/17/asia/japan-population-crisis-countryside-cities-intl-hnk-dst/index.html

[dismalist]

We been through all this stuff upthread.

You want to claim negative externalitites of fewer children on account of expensive housing? What happened to the population explosion? Fewer humans, less global warming. Positive externalitites.

There are certainly negative externalities: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/17/asia/japan-population-crisis-countryside-cities-intl-hnk-dst/index.html

Those are pecuniary externalities, money, not physical harm. My not having children hurts you through the way Social Security is financed and it benefits my wife and me equally. Even steven.  So, pay my wife and me to have children. Physical harm, so-called technological externalities, is reduced by having fewer children. We're better off on average if there are fewer children on account of the population explosion and global warming.

[jimbogumbo]

Warning: many graphs ahead. Analysis of financial system issues.

https://www.ft.com/content/179b9acf-e375-4471-990e-39c9772ada3b?segmentId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9

[Anselm]

https://chapwoodindex.com/

This is the price index I use to confirm my overall negative view of the economy.

[dismalist]

The Chapwood Index is an advertising gimmick. It must get extreme results or it will be overlooked.

It is not possible to understand their methodology

Every six months, we take the precise price for the same item quarter by quarter and calculate the increase or decrease, then developed a weighted index based on price.

What are the weights? Surely not the guy's friends expenditure shares on these items!

The text at the link shows that these guys do not understand what a cost-of-living index is and do not know how to go about constructing one.

They criticize that the CPI contains too many prices! You can't have too many prices in a price index.

Once again: The published CPI describes the weighted average price faced by approximately the mean consumer. The weights are base period expenditure shares. For that person, the CPI overstates inflation because the base weights ignore substitution in response to price change. [The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index is the current weighted version, and understates inflation, for consumers have already substituted away from more expensive stuff.] The truth lies somewhere in between.

Inflation facing each individual will be different from the CPI on account our expenditure shares are different. Individual category price increases for the CPI are published. One can then reweight them with one's own expenditure shares.

These guys don't know what they don't know.

[marshwiggle]

The Chapwood Index is an advertising gimmick. It must get extreme results or it will be overlooked.

It is not possible to understand their methodology

Every six months, we take the precise price for the same item quarter by quarter and calculate the increase or decrease, then developed a weighted index based on price.

What are the weights? Surely not the guy's friends expenditure shares on these items!

It's a bit weird that there's a gap from the last half of 2019 until the last half of 2021. (Covid, presumably?)
However, if you calculate the cumulative increase for New York, it works out to 210% since 2016. Have prices really doubled in NYC since 2016? For the "500 most bought items"? That seems steep.

 

[dismalist]

The Chapwood Index is an advertising gimmick. It must get extreme results or it will be overlooked.

It is not possible to understand their methodology

Every six months, we take the precise price for the same item quarter by quarter and calculate the increase or decrease, then developed a weighted index based on price.

What are the weights? Surely not the guy's friends expenditure shares on these items!

It's a bit weird that there's a gap from the last half of 2019 until the last half of 2021. (Covid, presumably?)
However, if you calculate the cumulative increase for New York, it works out to 210% since 2016. Have prices really doubled in NYC since 2016? For the "500 most bought items"? That seems steep.

That's not steep; that's idiotic. New York inflation was 1.08%, 1.96%, 1.91%, 1.65%, 1.71%, 3.32% from 2016 to 2021 measured as a CPI.

https://www.in2013dollars.com/New-York/price-inflation

This is really a case of:

Q: What's the inflation rate?

A: What do you want it to be?

[jimbogumbo]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/persons-of-interest/what-if-were-thinking-about-inflation-all-wrong