Hedonics is a whole fucking thing… I… I dont wanna talk about it lol.
What I can briefly mention is that uh…yeah, recently?
Well, there have been budget cuts to the orgs and personnel that actuslly do the price surveys… so a growing number of econ data dorks suspect that… we are now up to roughly 1/3 of individual items in the CPI being calculated by… imputation.
Which is more or less a fancy stats way of saying ‘we were not actually able to count this so we are just gonna assume it stayed the same.’
And thats all before Trump just straight up fired the BLS chief and replaced her with a Jan 6th insurrectionist.
You really shouldn’t underfund or fuck with the people that produce some of the most important numbers in a financialized market economy, but oh well I guess!
They use chained CPI too, which accounts for “the consumer adjusting their purchasing”. It literally bakes in the concept of enshittification.
If retirees replace beef with beaf, social security will save millions! That’s fiscal responsibility.
It’s The Jungle all over again. History sure rhymes.
Hedonics is a whole fucking thing… I… I dont wanna talk about it lol.
What I can briefly mention is that uh…yeah, recently?
Well, there have been budget cuts to the orgs and personnel that actuslly do the price surveys… so a growing number of econ data dorks suspect that… we are now up to roughly 1/3 of individual items in the CPI being calculated by… imputation.
Which is more or less a fancy stats way of saying ‘we were not actually able to count this so we are just gonna assume it stayed the same.’
And thats all before Trump just straight up fired the BLS chief and replaced her with a Jan 6th insurrectionist.
You really shouldn’t underfund or fuck with the people that produce some of the most important numbers in a financialized market economy, but oh well I guess!
Into lalaland we a-go.