> credit card debt hit an all-time high last year ($1.28 trillion, Q4 2025)

Let me inflation adjust that for you: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpo. Even better, as a percentage of disposable income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpt

> real hourly wages, only 3%

Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpE. Doesn't look so dire to me?

Whenever I see someone quoting economic statistics I look them up on FRED and zoom out a little. Usually I close the article at that point. The "Ongoing collusion" table in this article is interesting, though. Capitalism breaks down without competition.

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smallmancontrov 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When prices rise and wages don't keep pace, individual solvency forces substitution of inferior goods. CPI's methodology then updates the basket to reflect the forced substitution and pretend it was voluntary. You think you are looking at rising real wages, but due to the basket methodology you are actually looking at the individual solvency constraint in a mirror. The economy could reduce people to eating bug burgers in homeless encampments and that line would still go up through the entire process.

Repeat the exercise using a real deflator and the results are different. Ideally, this would mean constructing a basket of things you (or the people in question) want to buy. In practice, nobody has time for that so people just use an asset with a reputation for holding value (gold) or a proxy for their most important aspiration (housing). These both have problems, but the problems are not nearly as bad as the circular logic in the CPI.

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cheriot 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Agree that measuring inflation is complex and expensive. It also glosses over devices getting new features and networks improving latency and bandwidth.

Unfortunately alternative measures are worse. Gold increased in price 37% in the last year. What does that tell me about the price of groceries? Housing prices depend on government committees approving what can be built where. We have no idea what a free market would produce.

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smallmancontrov 4 hours ago | parent [-]

No, CPI does not gloss over improvements in quality. CPI gets diligent hedonic adjustments. Good news is always welcome, it seems. By contrast, BLS usually doesn't even try to track enshittification. This compounds, and that's another reason why CPI is a poor measure. Not to mention the recent statistical fuckery with trimmed means or the less recent fuckery around excluding energy costs during bouts of energy inflation. How much proof do you need that CPI is a political quantity not a measure of the economy?

Hypothetical YIMBY parallel universes have no place in an inflation discussion. If NIMBYs inflated the price of houses and you want a house, it's inflation that is relevant to you, end of story. As for the volatility of gold, yeah, that disqualifies gold from being a good measure on short timescales. Fortunately, we have a good short-timescale inflation measure: CPI. But gold compounds correctly whereas CPI does not. In the short run, volatility is everything, in the long run, compounding is everything. Don't use gold to figure out how much inflation happened last year and don't use CPI to figure out how much inflation happened last decade.

Reminder: I presented gold and housing as dirty hacks. The correct methodology is to construct a basket of things you care about and track them. If the dirty hacks have dirty hack problems, well, such is the nature of dirty hacks.

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3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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cheriot 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Then what number would you use instead? A "correct methodology" that's not done is useless.

Complaining about CPI to defend using nominal values poorly is not improving the article's analysis.

	▲	smallmancontrov 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Housing and gold, to be used when the timescale is more than a few years. CPI is fine if the timescale is under a few years, because that is not enough time for its sins to compound. You posted an incorrect interpretation of the FRED real wages line. All I owe the discussion is an explanation of why I believe your interpretation was incorrect. Which I gave. The fact that I went above and beyond to provide and defend both a theoretical alternative and practical alternatives is a nice extra. Your complaints that the practical alternatives aren't simultaneously perfect and easy is praise by faint damnation. Perfect and easy aren't the ways of this world. No, they only have to be better than CPI on long timescales to be good alternatives -- but the CPI methodology places that bar very low and both gold and housing clear it easily.

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caidehen 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think commonly used inflation is helpful for many people, instead asset price inflation is more interesting and reflects people's feeling more accurate.

If you use asset price inflation, in the last 2 decades, most people's real income consistently dropped.

	▲	smallmancontrov 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think we 80% agree: people should use a measure of inflation that includes more asset inflation than CPI. The American Dream was not to Owner's Imputed Rent a house. However, there's a balance to be struck with reasonable expectations, and "I want to own an increasing fraction of the world economy" isn't a reasonable expectation for everyone to have, but that's what jumping to a wholesale asset inflation measure would get you. The way I pick a midpoint is by fixing the asset: one lump of gold, or one house, are reasonable to use as reference points. But not "one billionth of the revenue from the search monopoly" or "one billionth of all newly mined gold" because those things might be expected to grow without robbing me of anything I care about.

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conception 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

Also breaks down when few individuals command tremendous power. Tax policy has been //fantastic// for the very wealthy.

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TacticalCoder 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Let me inflation adjust that for you

Oh, perfect! So what about solving every problem by going $40 more trillion in debt, to reach $80 T in debt?

That way everything will be good inflation adjusted?

	▲	cheriot 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I am in favor of apples-to-apples comparisons and viewing data points in context. Now sure how that has to with fiscal deficits.