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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: 0s | 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. dragonwriter ◴[31 Oct 25 23:48 UTC] No.45777962[source]▶
ALICE is arguably a better measure of for poverty needs, but a worse measure for overall consumer price levels (the latter is true for the same reason as the former.)

There is a very good argument to have different headline measures for those purposes—currently CPI is used for a lot, and the main alternative used for policy by, e.g., the Fed, PCE, while different than CPI in detail isn’t difference in focus (though I'd argue the focus is proper for the Fed’s main use, you wouldn’t want broad monetary policy driven by something with ALICE’s focus when the results significantly diverged from a broader basket measure, though you would probably want poverty-targeted fiscal programs to be.)

Inflation as applicable to different contexts being treated as a scalar rather than a multidimensional vector is a mistake.