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Comment by hyperpape | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate this graph as a (very partial) rejoinder to the inflation truthers.

I could believe that there is some modest measurement error in how we calculate inflation, but, picking relatively arbitrary dates that I happen to remember, the idea that 2000-2025 inflation was double the reported numbers doesn't pass the sniff test.

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What dates? 2000 August–2025 August gives 3.18%/year for the consumer index and 7.12%/year for egg prices. Even if you assume egg prices will come down to $3/dozen, it's still 6.24%/year.

I don't have a horse in this race outside of general skepticism of official numbers (though inflation is particularly difficult to fake since you can literally just buy/assess the basket of goods the figures represent yourself), but I don't think this is the rejoinder you're looking for. Eggs went from 0.975 to 3.587, a 3.68x increase. CPI went from 1.69 to 3.23, a 1.9x increase. So the price of eggs increased 93% more than nominal inflation.

Wouldn’t that make eggs the outlier? For CPI to be wrong you’d have to show similar rises in lots of other things.

You could look at the graph and argue that eggs show official uninflation was underestimated from 2000 to 2025, but to be consistent, you'd then have to argue that it was overestated from 1985 to 2000.

I have two points, really: I appreciate the graph showing pretty good correlation between official CPI and the price of a very widely consumed

Secondarily, you can observe (not by thinking about eggs, b/c I don't remember what they cost in 2000, but just prices in general), that there hasn't been huge inflation since 2000 compared to the official numbers.

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