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Comment by magicmu | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Is there an existing standard for what everyday goods are used in determining inflation? I understand the usefulness of a "quick 'n dirty" gauge like this big mac index (or the iPod index you mentioned), but I'd be surprised if there isn't some standard set of goods which are watched as general indicators of inflation.

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Its pretty obvious if you read a CPI report yourself.

http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpid1505.pdf

Page 6 has the list and the weights of all goods per category. Housing is 42% of the CPI index, for example. Urban consumers vs Rural consumers are combined together, but the later tables split them out again.

People generally only talk about the single CPI number as an indicator in inflation. But a lot of work (and tables) go into that number.

Additionally, depending on what you're trying to measure, there are a variety of different sorts of ways to adjust for inflation. The CPI is a measure of consumer prices, and used by the Fed as a target for inflation in order to maintain price stability, but there are others: http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/

The CPI is flawed, of course, like any attempt to turn 300 million peoples' worth of purchases into a single number. The Federal Reserve itself thinks that it's a little bit on the high side, not doing enough to adjust for the changes that occur when better products are introduced or when people change their purchasing behavior (e.g. switching to generic products): http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic...

> a lot of work (and tables) go into that number.

Economics is a whole field of study.

> The CPI is flawed, of course, like any attempt to turn 300 million peoples' worth of purchases into a single number.

The CPI doesn't even in theory try to do that, which is why it includes CPI-U, CPI-W, and C-CPI-U, each of which is tracked raw and seasonally adjusted, and each of which contains numerous measures (not a single number), the most frequently used of which seem to be the "all items", "all items less food and energy", "food", "energy", and "gasoline" components. (And all of which relate to US urban consumers -- for CPI-U and C-CPI-U -- or a subset thereof -- for CPI-W -- which are less than 300 million people.)

Very cool, thanks so much for the link!

There is a standard but it changes with the times and the location. As indicated below it can be manipulated by adding or removing items that fluctuate wildly. There is a lot of disagreement about whether it is a good measure, what to include, and how to use it once it has been measured.

The CPI, in America at least, is literally thousands of items. Probably stuff like bus pass, bread, milk, a hammer a Daisy Red Ryder BBGun, etc.

Obviously a the bbgun was a joke, but I wouldn't be surprised if bullets or ammo made the cut.

I would certainly put a brick of .22LR cartridges in the US basket, along with a box of 12ga shotgun shells, if nothing else.

When you change the items in the basket, you make the index basically incomparable with previously used measures. That is what makes it such a juicy target for politicians. And you have to change it at some point or another, because new products get invented. For instance, if your basket does not now contain a month of cellular phone service, it needs to be updated.

Its actually a very complex area and the setting of inflation measures is open to gaming and political pressure.

For example The last UK government didn't like the new CPIH index and the ONS (office of national statistics) was told to go away and try again.

The standard is not a list of products, but the idea that the basket should contain items that represent the consumption of either companies or the public reasonably well.

This means the basket might differ from country to country, because consumption patterns are different.

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