Shadowstats.com has been tracking inflation with old methods for a long time
There is plenty of genuine spirited debate to be had over the basket of goods. There is room for using one indicator over another for any given application. Even against that backdrop shadowstats is clearly just a grift.
Absolutely, but this kind of debate needs to be done in good faith and with the understanding that whatever new basket of goods one comes up with is unlikely to be applicable to any more people in the economy.
The basket of goods is like a a medium shirt. It's not going to fit anyone very well, and it won't fit most people at all. Swapping the shirt out for a large isn't going to improve the fit for people as a whole, it will just change the people who fit in it.
The curse of dimensionality rears its head when talking about "averages" over a number of dimensions. There's not really a good methodology to distill such a complex topic down to a single figure.
https://fullstackeconomics.com/no-the-real-inflation-rate-is...
tldr: they don't actually reconstruct the old methodology. They add a fudge factor based on how much they think the new methodology increases the inflation rate. And that estimate is based on a basic math error.