Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Summers: Inflation Reached 18% in 2022 Using the Government's Previous Formula

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 461 posts

Re: Summers: Inflation Reached 18% in 2022 Using the Government's Previous Formula

#301

Post by michaelt »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #269
woodruffw wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember in 1963 only the man was working, and typically supported 4 kids, a wife and often parents in the home. This is a ridiculous exaggeration: the average US household was 3.7 people in the 1960s, not over 6[1]. There are good reasons to hold politicians to task for recent abnormally high inflation. But this comment is more of an atavistic fever dream of the past than an expression of those reasons. Edit: anot…

That's missing forest for the trees. The more important part is that average 3.7 people household was a single-income one . I would rather disagree with GP's: > My point is that inflation isn’t abstract and it isn’t a law of nature. It’s a deliberate approach to stealing your prosperity while you cheer it on. A lot of the inflation, including how suddenly a single-income household isn't a viable option for most peopl…

> That's missing forest for the trees.

However, when a person is making a post saying "don't trust those dodgy manipulated numbers" and offering alternative numbers, their post is a lot less convincing if their numbers are also dodgy

Re: Summers: Inflation Reached 18% in 2022 Using the Government's Previous Formula

#302

Post by rayiner »

fire_lake wrote: post #298
rayiner wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He destroyed half the social safety net in this country Democrats controlled the House the whole time, so how’d he manage that? > while running on a hideously bigoted platform What a remarkable assertion.

The monkey tape is revealing.

Revealing of what? That racist jokes were normalized back in the 1970s? It’s not like we stopped telling exactly that same joke—we just changed the social norm around who is allowed to tell that joke. Are you more likely to treat people fairly because you won’t tell that joke (but would still laugh at the similar Dave Chapelle bits?) and what does it have to do with his platform?

Re: Summers: Inflation Reached 18% in 2022 Using the Government's Previous Formula

#304

Post by philwelch »

tonymet wrote: post #16

I recommend people use many different indicators to get a mental model of inflation, and you will notice that CPI does not represent inflation well. The memes of Arby’s 5 for $5 becoming 4 for $10 are more informative than the CPI numbers. Don’t let the shock at the grocery store wear off – it’s real and painful despite what the news tells you. True inflation would measure the amount of prosperity achieved per hour w…

I also have like six different machines in my house that would each, single-handedly, put the entire computing infrastructure of the Apollo program to shame. And my corneas have been reshaped into the ideal form by a computer-controlled laser, giving me 20/10 vision. I haven’t done it yet, but I could get my entire genome sequenced. A $20 Italian rifle sounds like a good deal but today you can buy a machine that literally prints guns (some assembly required). Any one of these things would be worth millions if not billions of dollars in the 1960’s.

This also explains why Palo Alto is so much more expensive these days. Some the things I mentioned were invented around there, which made a lot of those people rich.

Other things have become more affordable too. In 1960, a round trip flight from New York to London cost $550. I can find similar fares right now. In 1984, a Macintosh cost $2500, had 128 KB of RAM and a 9 inch 512 by 342 pixel display. For half as many dollars today, you can buy an iMac with a 24 inch 4.5K display and 8 GB of RAM.

Now, I will admit that many things are needlessly more expensive, and while the reasons for this are complicated, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that many of these cost increases are directly associated with institutions getting taken over by parasitic classes of administrators and bureaucrats. If you go to college, you’re not just paying for the inherent costs of the college; you’re also paying for the growing administrative bureaucracy that has infested the institution. If you go to the doctor, you’re not just paying your local family doctor; you’re paying an entire bureaucracy that has reduced your family doctor—who used to own a private practice—to the status of a corporate employee, plus a completely separate “health insurance” bureaucracy. (It turned out that the doctor who reshaped my corneas with lasers was happy to just take cash though!)

Governments are some of the worst effected. The cost to build the US interstate highway system was, adjusted for inflation, about 618 billion dollars. The 2021 infrastructure bill totaled 1.2 trillion dollars, but are we really getting the equivalent of two complete interstate highway systems? But hey, it could be worse—it’s not like they actually collected all the tax dollars they needed to pay for it! That’s a problem for future America. I don’t envy those guys!

Re: Summers: Inflation Reached 18% in 2022 Using the Government's Previous Formula

#305

Post by robocat »

caseysoftware wrote: post #188
caesil wrote: post #37

I don't really understand the argument at the heart of this article, which is "we should include interest rates in CPI". How do interest rates effect everyday people exactly, other than price inflation on goods and services (which is included separately in CPI)? The only way seems to be interest rates on personal loans and mortgages. So if anything, we should only include interest rates in proportion to how many peop…

> "The only way seems to be interest rates on personal loans and mortgages." Yes, exactly. As noted in the article and the underlying study, 80% of car purchases are done via a loan and financing is not part of the inflation measure. When you look at buying a home, most are also done via loans and still financing is not part of the measure. In both cases, interest rates are a factor in affordability and cost. > Blind…

> interest rates are a factor in affordability and cost

Paradoxically over a long term, interest rates don't affect house affordability much.

People bid on houses at the limit of what they can spend - the constraint is their income not the interest rate.

As interest rates fall, people pay the same interest payments but bid higher on the house price (driving house prices up). As interest rates rise, people spend the same amount monthly (on interest payments) but borrow less in total and can bid less on houses.

It is a steady-state argument, so other things do matter (income changes, mortgage qualification rules, immigration into the area, dynamic effects of interest rate changes). Rent has other factors but the constraint of income has parallel effects.

Re: Summers: Inflation Reached 18% in 2022 Using the Government's Previous Formula

#306

Post by Rinzler89 »

gumby wrote: post #164
tonymet wrote: post #16

I recommend people use many different indicators to get a mental model of inflation, and you will notice that CPI does not represent inflation well. The memes of Arby’s 5 for $5 becoming 4 for $10 are more informative than the CPI numbers. Don’t let the shock at the grocery store wear off – it’s real and painful despite what the news tells you. True inflation would measure the amount of prosperity achieved per hour w…

> Today Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and other super zips are exclusively [A slight exaggeration] $500k incomes and up. In the 1960 census records you will find these good neighborhoods occupied with plumbers, painters and other blue collar workers. This was unfortunately a deliberate consequence of the dot com boom, not something that happened in previous tech booms. Until around 2000 Palo Alto actually had a lower median…

>PA used to be a town where the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and the like got started. Harold and Maude was (partially) filmed here. But such things are now inconceivable.

I remember how in the 80's and 90's there were still movies like Mrs. Doubtfire with characters on minimum wage renting in downtown San Francisco lol

Re: Summers: Inflation Reached 18% in 2022 Using the Government's Previous Formula

#307

Post by Rinzler89 »

imtringued wrote: post #282
sanp wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Reagan the fiscal conservative who tripled the deficit and national debt: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/e...

Greek austerity imposed by Germans had resulted in the doubling of debt as percentage of GDP.

Which Germans imposed Greek austerity? AFAIK Greek austerity was imposed by Greece's major creditors, but Germany was only one of many.

Re: Summers: Inflation Reached 18% in 2022 Using the Government's Previous Formula

#308

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

voisin wrote: post #178
bugbuddy wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to our experience of the last 7 years, we should expect interest rate cuts, tax cuts, and more fiscal expansion either at the same time or in some sequence. Each of them will help solve our problem. There is no fiscal conservative left in America.

> There is no fiscal conservative left in America. Truer words have never been spoken. Fiscal conservatism died with Reagan.

Fiscal conservatism died with fiat and John Maynard Keynes' "In the long run we are all dead."

Re: Summers: Inflation Reached 18% in 2022 Using the Government's Previous Formula

#309

Post by fireflash38 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #269
woodruffw wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember in 1963 only the man was working, and typically supported 4 kids, a wife and often parents in the home. This is a ridiculous exaggeration: the average US household was 3.7 people in the 1960s, not over 6[1]. There are good reasons to hold politicians to task for recent abnormally high inflation. But this comment is more of an atavistic fever dream of the past than an expression of those reasons. Edit: anot…

That's missing forest for the trees. The more important part is that average 3.7 people household was a single-income one . I would rather disagree with GP's: > My point is that inflation isn’t abstract and it isn’t a law of nature. It’s a deliberate approach to stealing your prosperity while you cheer it on. A lot of the inflation, including how suddenly a single-income household isn't a viable option for most peopl…

I think people are asking the wrong questions when it comes to inflation. It's not which president is at fault... It's who is profiting from it? It's not the minimum wage worker. It's not the standard office worker.

What class has shown absolutely insane growth in wealth and income in the face of what looks like crippling inflation?

Re: Summers: Inflation Reached 18% in 2022 Using the Government's Previous Formula

#310

Post by exe34 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #269
woodruffw wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember in 1963 only the man was working, and typically supported 4 kids, a wife and often parents in the home. This is a ridiculous exaggeration: the average US household was 3.7 people in the 1960s, not over 6[1]. There are good reasons to hold politicians to task for recent abnormally high inflation. But this comment is more of an atavistic fever dream of the past than an expression of those reasons. Edit: anot…

That's missing forest for the trees. The more important part is that average 3.7 people household was a single-income one . I would rather disagree with GP's: > My point is that inflation isn’t abstract and it isn’t a law of nature. It’s a deliberate approach to stealing your prosperity while you cheer it on. A lot of the inflation, including how suddenly a single-income household isn't a viable option for most peopl…

It's not the market that's eating the "surplus". Economic inequality is at an all time high. Big corporations are posting record-busting profits. Inflation is driven by greedflation, mostly.
Post reply on HN