Live data from Hacker News

The USA Inflation Rate by Truflation Is 4.21%

truflation.com

21–30 of 75 posts

Re: The USA Inflation Rate by Truflation Is 4.21%

#21

There is no way that matches reality, where does the person publishing such a chart even live? Do they buy eggs or pay rent? Here is a real alternative - John William's shadow stats. He simply measures inflation as the government used to in the 80s and 70s, and surprise surprise its more like 10% or 14% - no phony "Owner's equivalent rent". http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

My own personal rate of inflation (e.g. gas, eggs, etc.) is about 15% YoY which is inline with the shadowstats figure.

Re: The USA Inflation Rate by Truflation Is 4.21%

#23

There is no way that matches reality, where does the person publishing such a chart even live? Do they buy eggs or pay rent? Here is a real alternative - John William's shadow stats. He simply measures inflation as the government used to in the 80s and 70s, and surprise surprise its more like 10% or 14% - no phony "Owner's equivalent rent". http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

Things other than inflation can cause prices of specific XYZ to rise. Wasn't there some bird flu thing that constrained the egg supply? Rent and housing costs were going up before the pandemic. Add this to the existing inflation and it's bad, esp. for housing costs.

Ok, if you were the government and I asked you to measure rent increases - what would you do? Would you look at the cost of renting on average in a city and compare them to last years? Seems like the most obvious way...

Well, that is not how the government does it now. It currently uses a metric called "owner's equivalent rent". Where instead they call up people who own there houses and ask them how much they would rent it for. It is essentially a survey instead of hard data. This has the effect of hugely underestimating the value of housing - and thats just housing!

Lets talk about measuring food prices, well according to the US government you can have "substitutions". If you think measuring the price of steak is as easy as comparing the number between the years you'd be wrong again, because what they currently do is say "well people are really buying ground beef instead of steak so well use those prices instead". What's next substituting in dog food?

Thats not even to mention "hedonic adjustments"...

When the government relies on a statistic for policy it stops becoming a reliable statistic because the incentive is just too high to not manipulate the numbers

Re: The USA Inflation Rate by Truflation Is 4.21%

#24

There is no way that matches reality, where does the person publishing such a chart even live? Do they buy eggs or pay rent? Here is a real alternative - John William's shadow stats. He simply measures inflation as the government used to in the 80s and 70s, and surprise surprise its more like 10% or 14% - no phony "Owner's equivalent rent". http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

I wonder if we all tabulated all our expenses in the most fine grained detail and calculated our own personal rates of inflation how meaningful it would be to have percentiles of our population to say things like 50% of citizens experience a personal inflation rate of x.xx%. That would be very fascinating. I'm almost there myself with some web order scraping I've been playing with. It's a lot of work but once I tackle another big vendor of mine I should be able to look at trends for given products over time that I regularly buy.

Re: The USA Inflation Rate by Truflation Is 4.21%

#25
This makes sense. It has been one years since the war started which was the leading cause of inflation.

Now with the first year passed, we compare today’s prices to after war prices a year ago, which were already high.

I’m expecting the rate go down further the next months.

EDIT: of course I’m not suggesting inflation started on the day bullets started flying. Things were heating up before with Russia slowing down exports strategically well ahead of time and tensions were on the rise for some time.

Re: The USA Inflation Rate by Truflation Is 4.21%

#26
post #19

From the whitepaper: > We propose using the world’s vast data access, blockchain technology, and the enormous potential of decentralized systems and organizations to provide a developer solution to the inflation problem. > Truflation is the first true US inflation index based on the independent data sources and metrics created by developers and crypto investors for developers and the crypto community. > The US Trufla…

Yeah, if anyone can find any information about the source of the data that would be useful. They can say they're transparent over and over again, but that doesn't necessarily make it so. Also, if they're selling their information as a commercial service, their bias has to be taken into account as well.

It is on-chain, there is no fee to use it. It was funded by winning a $100k grant from Chainlink.

https://whitepaper.truflation.com/background/what-is-truflat...

Re: The USA Inflation Rate by Truflation Is 4.21%

#27

From the whitepaper: > We propose using the world’s vast data access, blockchain technology, and the enormous potential of decentralized systems and organizations to provide a developer solution to the inflation problem. > Truflation is the first true US inflation index based on the independent data sources and metrics created by developers and crypto investors for developers and the crypto community. > The US Trufla…

> “data sources and metrics created by developers and crypto investors”

I... if I had to name groups of people I would not trust to build data sources and metrics for broad economic measures, “developers” and “crypto investors” would both be very close to the top.

Re: The USA Inflation Rate by Truflation Is 4.21%

#29

There is no way that matches reality, where does the person publishing such a chart even live? Do they buy eggs or pay rent? Here is a real alternative - John William's shadow stats. He simply measures inflation as the government used to in the 80s and 70s, and surprise surprise its more like 10% or 14% - no phony "Owner's equivalent rent". http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

[deleted]
Post reply on HN