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Comment by vitus | Hacker News Reader

It depends what dates you're looking at, but energy (gas prices and more) and food (including eggs) are generally recognized as way more volatile than the rest of the CPI.

Eggs were actually quite stable for the 20 years prior to 2001, so maybe don't put your life savings into egg futures...

Egg prices: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111

CPI: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

Core CPI (without food + energy prices): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFESL

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That is very curious, yes. Eggs seem to just start to increase dramatically after 2000 and indeed outdo the CPI, disregarding the peaks and valleys of the different shocks to egg production like covid and the avian flu.

I read that the price includes free range, eco, etc varieties which are more expensive and in more demand nowadays, probably just that explains a good chunk of the price increase.

This is a good read if you haven’t seen it. Spoiler alert it’s private equity. Shocker I know.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-b...

That is indeed a good read, I wasn't aware that there is now a Big Egg fixing egg prices.

I think it is now relatively safe to assume that there is Big X fixing the prices of X, for pretty much any X that could turn a profit.

I feel like those links are more useful than the target essay.

Reading through them, I wonder why CPIs aren't based on empirical correlational patterns between prices over time? Sort of like in these articles:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1796/1/... https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1011.pdf

Or maybe they are? I'm not an expert in this and reading through some of the government literature there's no mention of this.

Then at least you would know that a given price marker is a good empirical index of how other prices are changing also, at least for a given dimension/component.

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