phiwong t1_jef6lvc wrote
Here is a longish article that explains your question and why certain items are sometimes removed. Basically there are some items that are more volatile and can mask other issues. In many cases, supplementary data is also available that tracks the excluded items and this gives economists a better idea of what are the underlying trends and account for the more price volatile items later.
DeludedRaven OP t1_jef70eg wrote
But wouldn’t things like food and the cost of energy be critical to calculating total inflation?
These are items that we simply cannot go without. I understand they’re volatile but at the same time people need to eat no matter what. They can stop buying television, they can’t stop buying loaves of bread. Either way I’ll check out the article. Thank you!
DeadFIL t1_jeff1rd wrote
I think you're falling into the old trap of hoping for a single metric to perfectly sum up a complex situation. As is often the case, no single number does that. The price changes of everything get tracked and analyzed and used for various purposes. Looking at different areas separately can tell you different things. You can go look up how houses, food, and gas prices have changed - nobody is concealing this information from you. But if you want a number that perfectly summarizes inflation, you're simply looking for something that does not and can not exist. Inflation is complex and happens for different things at different rates.
So, yeah, some metrics exclude some things so that they can better see the other things. That doesn't mean that the excluded things don't matter, it means that whatever metric you're looking at just doesn't include those things. If you want to see an inflation rate including those things, look at an index that includes them.
hiricinee t1_jefs2u0 wrote
If you look at food and energy over long periods, they work nicely.
The catch is look at something like eggs in the last few months. Was the doubling of egg prices evidence that prices across the board were going up, or was it an anomaly that corrected quickly? We'd be foolish to think that we were looking at an at large inflationary trend when they went up, or conversely, that there was a deflationary trend at large when they came back down.
throwbcuzgermanlaw t1_jegawhv wrote
Yes but that makes it possible to appease people with lower sounding numbers(even tho they now don't really mean anything anymore) and that's something interesting to the ruling
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