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The only people who feel good are making over $200k and have large portfolios

(fortune.com)
71 points dataflow | 1 comments | 31 Oct 25 21:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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darth_avocado ◴[31 Oct 25 23:24 UTC] No.45777816[source]▶
Like everyone else who’s observed a discrepancy between how they’re being told the economy is vs how they’re experiencing it, I’ve had my concerns about how CPI is being measured and how the policy decisions are rolled out. One of the things that’s missing is an indicator that cares only about the essentials that are family use frequently. Like falling prices of flatscreen TVs don’t matter as much if home insurance and car payments are skyrocketing.

I came across the ALICE indicator and it does something close to what I wanted. It tells a very different story of how the economy is doing. https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index

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1. cma ◴[31 Oct 25 23:40 UTC] No.45777913[source]▶
Since they didn't spell out the number: 14% discrepency between CPI and ALICE baselined between 2007 and now. This and the year before have a dashed line for ALICE and only this year for CPI, I guess that means projected but it isn't labeled.

I'm not sure the baselining makes sense other than showing the divergence from 2007; if ALICE turned out to be lower than CPI lower it would bias it but maybe more likely it started higher which biases it in another way. Baselining at the first year of the great recession might be very misleading, baselining the year before and difference in housing stuff might have made the divergence look very different. Rents ended up increasing through the recession though even if prices didn't.