The neat part is that there is no inflation here: you just substituted a worse product for a better one and our friends in the govt call it good.
The neat part is that there is no inflation here: you just substituted a worse product for a better one and our friends in the govt call it good.
I very much disagree that it's a worse product.
I knew a man who worked in the food industry for forty years. He told me to never eat U.S. pork the way it is processed today.
Anyone that truly knows how the sausage is made, so to speak, will tell you that in any country. Meat processing isn't pretty in any form.
i mean that cant be true if you also admit to only buying it because your preferred product became too expensive.
why weren't you always eating pork then? (I like both, prefer beef usually but buy pork often, dislike how hogs are treated tho compared to cows)
> why weren't you always eating pork then?
That's not what they said.
Why were you buying beef before, then? Hasn't pork always been cheaper than beef?
Historically, I've always bought both. It's nice to have variety. The difference now is that I'm not buying both.
because variety is the spice of life
>you just substituted a worse product for a better one and our friends in the govt call it good.
I agree that somewhat distorts the effect of inflation, but at the same time it has to be done for inflation measures to make any sense. Otherwise we'd still be measuring the prices of heating coal and whale blubber.
Because those are our only two options?
We ar perfectly capable of intelligently changing how we calculate inflation. And the current administration's idea that if an American stops buying something because they cannot afford it anymore, means inflation went down is delusional.
>We ar perfectly capable of intelligently changing how we calculate inflation.
What do you propose then? All the places where the BLS is "intelligently changing how we calculate inflation" creates controversy: hedonic/quality adjustments, substitution/weight changes, owners equivalent rent, the list goes on and on. What it practically boils down to is that people have an agenda (ie. inflation is high or low), and if the official numbers doesn't seem right to them, they accuse the current administration of fudging it, even if there's no evidence of methodology change.
There isn't really one single measure of inflation, despite what is often implied. There are many. The reason for that is that every measurement methodology distorts some aspect of the economy, so you (should) choose the measure that distorts the least for the aspect you care about.
I think Greenspan called it hedonics.