[jrussino]

Thanks to NPR for this important reporting; it sucks that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down after losing all of its funding.

This "basked of goods" approach to understanding price inflation seems outdated to me. 114 items! It seems to me like there must be organizations out there with tons and tons of price and consumer spending data for thousands and thousands of items, right? It should be possible to get much more comprehensive measurement of price changes over time vs and approach taken like this one (or the CPI, for that matter).

[darth_avocado]

I’ve had a gripe with “basket of goods” approach. Does a household really care that much if the game of clue is 10% cheaper in 2025?

There needs to be an index that reflects what people really need and the closest I’ve found is the ALICE index: https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index

[naet]

I think the ALICE index is great for tracking pure essentials and survivability, which is definitely important, but it's also not unreasonable to track things that aren't 100% essential.

My household does care if basic games and toys are cheaper or more expensive; we have kids and want to get some amount of stuff for them. If the price changes we will get more or less of those things since our budget for them is limited. I probably won't fall into abject poverty if some non essential things go up in price, but I also will be buying less which has both personal and broader economic impacts.

[throw0101d]

> I’ve had a gripe with “basket of goods” approach. Does a household really care that much if the game of clue is 10% cheaper in 2025?

The game of Clue, and other games/toys, are in basket of goods because on average Americans spend some portion of their income per surveys:

* https://www.bls.gov/respondents/cpi/

The CPI published (and in headlines) isn't about your personal spending, but the spending on average spread over millions of people/households. The CPI is a model of reality, and so pointing to a particular instantiation of consumer will not match exactly:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong

[joshuamorton]

This isn't really indexing in the same way that the CPI is indexing.

Alice pulls medians from other surveys (so it uses what I assume to be CPI food and CPI housing data, though they may also use other things), and then includes childcare and healthcare costs with some (imo) pretty painful assumptions, and then tacks on a random 10% "misc" category. It does a good job of creating a very high estimate of costs. As one example, I looked at the housing cost for an suburb I'm familiar with, and it lists the housing cost for a single individual as nearly $1800, you can pretty easily find 1BR apartments for 1-1.2K in that area, and utilities aren't going to run $600/mo, and you can pretty easily go cheaper.

And then again after doing that it tacks on a "misc" 10% budget item. I wouldn't call it a good estimate of "what people really need" and also it consumes the basket of goods, it doesn't compare to it.

[eszed]

I did not know about this, and it's excellent. Seems like a one-shot explanation for the "vibe-flation" phenomenon that many people find mystifying.

[kjshsh123]

The CPI components are individually tracked and weighting is public. You can just play with the weights.

[bpt3]

Most households are able to afford more than the essentials and do care about the cost of entertainment.

There's value in the index you described as well, but IMO it doesn't make sense to use it as the basis for the overall economy.

[boplicity]

Toys for kids are absolutely a necessity in most households with kids.

[bpt3]

1. It sounds like you're just describing a larger "basket of goods"? That data is available, but also valuable, and I'm not sure why the basket of goods tracked by the CPI or NPR would be inadequate.

2. This specific exercise is designed to be relatable to individuals (in general, and specifically ones such as the people interviewed in the article who claimed that their grocery bill went up about 50% in a year, which is implausible to put it politely) so that they can understand the actual level of inflation rather than the one they imagined in their head.

[tclancy]

The Economist tried to solve this in the past with https://www.economist.com/interactive/big-mac-index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index for non-subscribers)

[tracker1]

I often toyed with the thought of a TP index... literally the spend on something you use to wipe crap off your rear and throw away.

[queuebert]

Credit card companies have all of this data. They could track classes of spending and regress out rising incomes, age, etc.

[matt-attack]

I’m just how exactly does my credit card company know how much I paid for shampoo?

[topspin]

> Thanks to NPR for this important reporting

It's fascinating to see such work. By the grace of NPR, apparently the "transient inflation" narrative is officially inoperative, and plebian concerns about the price of eggs are now worthy!

Will wonders never cease?

[hoofhearted]

https://www.spins.com/