If you're comparing against 3-4 years ago, CPI says inflation was 18-21%.
So if it's actually 25-30%, that's a significant level of error but not an enormous one.
CPI says that, of those four years, almost all the inflation was in the middle two. So when it says 3.5% since last year, that's not a crazy number, it's more that it's hard to determine/remember which part of the inflation happened in exactly which month. Comparing today to 3-4 years ago is a better option for both accurate numbers and accurate memories.
It's not funny dude, that is a serious problem. I have parents on Social Security and I have to pay for their budgetary shortfall. Social Security in particular is supposed to be adjusted for inflation, which is one of the reasons the numbers are deliberately wrong.
>But seriously, there is a huge difference between "I think this metric is off by 3x or more" and "I think this metric is off by 1.4x"
I think annual inflation is actually 10% right now and probably got up to 20% during the pandemic. Depending on when you look at it, that is 2-3x what the official numbers say. Prices have not gone up uniformly across categories of course, but most things are significantly more expensive than than the official numbers would predict.
> Then you're talking about a completely different situation than ein0p. You shouldn't have replied to me about it.
I was respinding to the 1.4x vs 3x error thing.
I didn't edit the comment (I think). I'm not actually offended by the haha. I just think people may lose touch with the fact that these stats aren't just fun and games, and that some people get seriously screwed by inflation. If you thought houses were expensive before, that's probably just the beginning.
I think I misread something before I made that comment. Ignore the laughter.
But even with that mistake, I don't know why you think I was calling inflation itself funny.
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Though, you say the "money you worked so hard to earn"...
I could interpret that as either wages or savings.
If it means your wages buy 30% less, and inflation is 30%, then your nominal income hasn't increased. If so, something has gone very wrong, and it sounds like your employer is screwing you over.
So I think you mean the savings you had a few years ago. Is that right?
But if you had a meaningful amount of savings, were none of the savings in stocks? Stocks have gone up tremendously since the peak in early 2020.
And if you had a mortgage, it would have effectively shrunk by whatever amount your nominal income increased.
>If it means your wages buy 30% less, and inflation is 30%, then your nominal income hasn't increased. If so, something has gone very wrong, and it sounds like your employer is screwing you over.
Employers use the fake numbers to determine adjustments. It's not like they are necessarily screwing you over if they don't give you a 30% raise due to inflation either lol. They have to come up with extra cash because of inflation too.
>But if you had a meaningful amount of savings, were none of the savings in stocks? Stocks have gone up tremendously since the peak in early 2020.
That's not a profit dude. It's the simple phenomenon of everything costing more. Since most businesses are hurt by inflation, stocks do not keep up with rapid inflation.
>And if you had a mortgage, it would have effectively shrunk by whatever amount your nominal income increased.
It is true that inflation makes debts easier to pay, up to a point. But that means the lender gets screwed. It is a dysfunctional situation.
> It's not like they are necessarily screwing you over if they don't give you a 30% raise
Yes, but I wasn't asking about whether the raise is 30%. If you have a 12% raise during 30% inflation then you can buy 18% less, for example.
> That's not a profit dude. It's the simple phenomenon of everything costing more. Since most businesses are hurt by inflation, stocks do not keep up with rapid inflation.
It wouldn't have to be a profit for my point to work.
But have you looked at stocks? The S&P 500 went up not just more than 30%, it went up more than 50%. Stocks did profit. And that's versus the relative peak. Any other baseline in the range of 4 years ago and the increase is even higher, and from 5 years ago it's up 75%.
> But that means the lender gets screwed. It is a dysfunctional situation.
You can't make everyone happy, but I was focusing on the experience of a relatively average person.
>Yes, but I wasn't asking about whether the raise is 30%. If you have a 12% raise during 30% inflation then you can buy 18% less, for example.
If you're supposed to be getting raises anyway, how much of your raise is due to inflation and how much is due to advancement? I am making more money than I did before the pandemic but that was almost 4 years of grinding to reach that point. All indications I've seen point to people's wages not keeping up with inflation. Wages always lag behind other prices, and usually by a lot.
>It wouldn't have to be a profit for my point to work.
Your point was precisely that "gains" in the stock market make up for other downsides of inflation. This just doesn't work out. Our economy relies on the value of money remaining stable.
>But have you looked at stocks? The S&P 500 went up not just more than 30%, it went up more than 50%. Stocks did profit. And that's versus the relative peak. Any other baseline in the range of 4 years ago and the increase is even higher, and from 5 years ago it's up 75%.
Sorry but stocks are supposed to profit. In real terms there is probably a slight profit. The rest of the increases are pure devaluation of the dollar. At some point, businesses will likely struggle to remain profitable as everyone tries to cut costs.
>You can't make everyone happy, but I was focusing on the experience of a relatively average person.
I think stable money would actually be the best-case scenario and would make people happier than high inflation.
You have a very distorted idea of what is a "relatively average person"... Most people don't have money in the stock market (which I've already argued is not making up for inflation anyway). Most people don't own houses either. As much as I hate banks, lenders getting screwed due to inflation is terrible for the economy.
> Your point was precisely that "gains" in the stock market make up for other downsides of inflation.
Nah, just saying it can reduce the damage.
> You have a very distorted idea of what is a "relatively average person"... Most people don't have money in the stock market (which I've already argued is not making up for inflation anyway). Most people don't own houses either. As much as I hate banks, lenders getting screwed due to inflation is terrible for the economy.
I was covering all the bases. If you don't have significant savings, then losing 30% of negligible is also negligible. And the most common situations that involve savings/debt have gone in the favor of individuals.
It's not good for businesses, and the drop in real income is not good. But the income hurt is smaller than raw inflation, and the the savings situation is pretty nice actually.
> Sorry but stocks are supposed to profit. In real terms there is probably a slight profit.
Well I was talking to the guy that said inflation was 25-30%. If they're right than stocks have had a huge real profit.
Increased nominal value of assets doesn't reduce any damage actually. It just means that maybe you lost a smaller portion of your net worth than you would have otherwise.
>It's not good for businesses, and the drop in real income is not good. But the income hurt is smaller than raw inflation, and the the savings situation is pretty nice actually.
While some businesses may be able to psych people out with an unnecessary price hike, it doesn't actually help anything.
>Well I was talking to the guy that said inflation was 25-30%. If they're right than stocks have had a huge real profit.
No, there is no profit from inflation. The numbers are just getting bigger. There is one actual way to profit from inflation, and that is to borrow money and buy valuable stuff, then repay the loan with less valuable dollars.
> It just means that maybe you lost a smaller portion of your net worth than you would have otherwise.
Y-yes? That isn't reducing the damage to you?
> No, there is no profit from inflation. The numbers are just getting bigger. There is one actual way to profit from inflation, and that is to borrow money and buy valuable stuff, then repay the loan with less valuable dollars.
I didn't say the profit was from inflation.
If inflation is 30% percent, but your savings went up 60% since 4 years ago, then you profited overall. (And stocks would not have gone up the same amount if there was no inflation.)
Overall you're probably worse off than if inflation was lower, but you can't say that your money buys 30% less now.
Remember, I was specifically objecting to the idea that "inflation is X% in the last few years, therefore my money buys X% less". Ignoring that it's the wrong way to calculate percentages, the baseline idea is not true. The amount your wallet is impacted is more than 0, but less than inflation.
It is only reducing damage to you if you anticipated the inflation and avoided it. Here's an example:
Person 1: Has $5k in cash.
Person 2: Has $5k in cash and a house that is paid for, worth $100k.
After inflation, both of these people would lose the same amount of spending power on the $5k. The one with the house has an asset that goes up in dollars but is likely worth the same or less. His spending power goes down by just as much as the other guy, if not more.
>If inflation is 30% percent, but your savings went up 60% since 4 years ago, then you profited overall. (And stocks would not have gone up the same amount if there was no inflation.)
Ok so yes, if your stocks outperformed inflation somehow (despite inflation unofficially running 10-20% per year!) then you can claim a profit. But stocks are supposed to profit anyway. You did make it sound like you thought the inflation made the stocks more valuable. It does not, because inflation raises all prices in general.
>Overall you're probably worse off than if inflation was lower, but you can't say that your money buys 30% less now.
Actually yes you can. Money buys 30% less. If you had assets that rose with inflation, you can preserve your spending power. But your salary is not like that, nor any cash-adjacent instrument you have like savings, CDs, and treasuries.
>Remember, I was specifically objecting to the idea that "inflation is X% in the last few years, therefore my money buys X% less". Ignoring that it's the wrong way to calculate percentages, the baseline idea is not true. The amount your wallet is impacted is more than 0, but less than inflation.
You do have a point about it being backward. 20% inflation means your dollar buys about 83% of what it did previously. But as inflation is measured by price changes it literally means your money buys the straightforwardly-calculated reduced amount. You can't point to inflation avoidance schemes or occasional salary increases and say that shit offsets the actual price increases in a meaningful way. Accounting for inflation avoidance (an economic inefficiency produced by inflation) would require a whole new statistic.
> Person 1: Has $5k in cash. Person 2: Has $5k in cash and a house that is paid for, worth $100k.
Yeah the guy that has a paid-for house and zero stocks loses out asset-wise. That's a weird-ass balance of assets though.
> Ok so yes, if your stocks outperformed inflation somehow
Well again, I was talking to someone else, using their inflation number of 30% as the basis of my comment. Stocks objectively rose by a lot more than 30%.
I don't want to argue with you about what actual inflation was.
> Actually yes you can. Money buys 30% less. If you had assets that rose with inflation, you can preserve your spending power. But your salary is not like that, nor any cash-adjacent instrument you have like savings, CDs, and treasuries.
I addressed salary in my earlier comment. If your salary didn't have any extra increase because of inflation, your employer is screwing you over, stop letting them do that.
Salary and savings are two separate arguments and I made both of them.
> You can't point to inflation avoidance schemes
"Own some stock" is not a scheme, it's what you're supposed to do with significant amounts of savings.
> or occasional salary increases and say that shit offsets the actual price increases in a meaningful way
I think it's fair to count on an extra salary increase. Tons of people got extra salary increases from inflation. Were they enough to compensate for all of inflation? Usually not. But they were enough to reduce the losses. Which is all I need to make my point.
Especially because lower wage jobs got better increases, and higher wage jobs correlate to owning at least a few thousand dollars of stock.
>Yeah the guy that has a paid-for house and zero stocks loses out asset-wise. That's a weird-ass balance of assets though.
What I'm trying to tell you is that stocks are assets too! If they went up due to inflation, that's not "profit". It just takes more weaker dollars to buy the same stocks again.
>Stocks objectively rose by a lot more than 30%. I don't want to argue with you about what actual inflation was.
Again, if inflation was 30% and stocks went up 60%, you have to figure inflation into the actual earnings to see if profits are actually good (i.e., your spending power increased by the expected amount). You can take losses in spending power as the numbers keep going up dramatically. It's not profit (in the most meaningful sense) unless your spending power goes up.
>I addressed salary in my earlier comment. If your salary didn't have any extra increase because of inflation, your employer is screwing you over, stop letting them do that.
You didn't actually address it because you keep missing the point. Number goes up != profit. As for employers, they suffer from inflation too. Even if you have the luxurious position of being able to name your price, your employer might simply not have the money. Inflation represents theft, and someone always gets screwed.
>"Own some stock" is not a scheme, it's what you're supposed to do with significant amounts of savings.
That is a strategy proposed for NPCs, and it isn't right for everyone. Even if it was, it does not really protect you from rapid inflation, because inflation is a sign of a bad economy. It's probably better than holding currency directly but profits may not keep up with inflation. And most of all, stockholders don't benefit from inflation. They at best avoid some of the effects of inflation, in the best case.
>I think it's fair to count on an extra salary increase. Tons of people got extra salary increases from inflation. Were they enough to compensate for all of inflation? Usually not. But they were enough to reduce the losses. Which is all I need to make my point.
That's a weak ass point, bro. Lots of people have fixed incomes, or otherwise can't demand salary hikes and get them in a timely manner. Wages always trail inflation, and the official cooked numbers are used to gaslight employees into taking less. Many workers get fired when their companies lose money due to inflation. There is no free lunch.
>Especially because lower wage jobs got better increases, and higher wage jobs correlate to owning at least a few thousand dollars of stock.
I don't believe they got better increases. Lower wage workers have a much larger proportion of their salaries going toward expenses, and they are far more at risk of literally not having enough money due to inflation. Higher-wage workers may be more likely to participate in the stock market, but as I've laid out that is not really adequate protection from inflation. People in debt may benefit from inflation, but forking over unearned benefits to people in debt is a misuse of resources and an injustice to well-meaning creditors.
If you're just trying to argue that people have ways of attempting to cope with inflation, you can stop now. I agree with that. What I object to is the attitude of "it's not so bad" that you're offering up. Inflation is bad and there's no real escape for most people. Our lives will really suck if inflation gets (more) out of hand.
> What I'm trying to tell you is that stocks are assets too! If they went up due to inflation, that's not "profit". It just takes more weaker dollars to buy the same stocks again.
Let me quote the original post again.
"the money I worked so hard to earn now buys 30% less"
If your $1000 becomes $1600, and prices went up 30%, then you can buy more stuff then before.
I don't care what you define profit as.
(And if you say something about how you can buy fewer stocks, that doesn't matter. Number of shares is not an important number, only how many dollars of shares you have.)
> You didn't actually address it because you keep missing the point. Number goes up != profit.
The comment I replied to didn't use the word profit, and I didn't use the word profit in my reply. You brought the word profit into the conversation. I didn't use the word profit the way you wanted, I guess. So I will stop using the word profit. Problem solved.
> That's a weak ass point, bro. Lots of people have fixed incomes, or otherwise can't demand salary hikes and get them in a timely manner. Wages always trail inflation, and the official cooked numbers are used to gaslight employees into taking less.
You mentioned fixed incomes increased based on official CPI numbers earlier, right? That's enough to prove the point I was making. The cost of living adjustment just has to be more than 0 for my argument to be correct.
Lagging doesn't affect my point as long as the lag is less than four years. Gaslit too-small numbers don't affect my point as long as the gaslit numbers are still above 0.
> If you're just trying to argue that people have ways of attempting to cope with inflation, you can stop now. I agree with that. What I object to is the attitude of "it's not so bad" that you're offering up. Inflation is bad and there's no real escape for most people. Our lives will really suck if inflation gets (more) out of hand.
No, that's not my point at all.
Let's have an example number. For this example let's pretend prices went up 30%. If I say "relative to your income and savings, you're paying 25% more", I'm not saying "it's not so bad". That situation is really bad. I'm just saying it's not 30%.
And it's important to realize that those numbers are different if we want to do accurate calculations about inflation. I'm not pointing out the difference for the sake of pedantry.
>If your $1000 becomes $1600, and prices went up 30%, then you can buy more stuff then before.
Again, your money does not increase like this. Only assets do. Stocks in particular go up in price due to inflation and naturally-occurring profit. You're the one asserting that assets ought to be brought into it, and I've been telling you that assets do not avoid the consequences of inflation.
>I don't care what you define profit as.
>The comment I replied to didn't use the word profit, and I didn't use the word profit in my reply. You brought the word profit into the conversation. I didn't use the word profit the way you wanted, I guess. So I will stop using the word profit. Problem solved.
Look, I don't think the original comment mentioned stocks either. You're the one who brought that into the equation. They did not gain because of inflation. They at best held value despite inflation. The reason they went up in terms of dollars is largely due to the depreciation of the dollar, and secondarily because of profits (using the dollar-based definition or purchasing-power definition, it doesn't matter). You're pointing to stocks as if they are a life hack for beating inflation, or even something to be taken for granted, and I'm here to tell you that they're not.
>You mentioned fixed incomes increased based on official CPI numbers earlier, right? That's enough to prove the point I was making. The cost of living adjustment just has to be more than 0 for my argument to be correct.
When they say the number is 6-8% and inflation is raging at 20%, your "point" is not helpful. Even if you're right, it's a pointless observation. Inflation is still bad mmmkay?
>Lagging doesn't affect my point as long as the lag is less than four years. Gaslit too-small numbers don't affect my point as long as the gaslit numbers are still above 0.
What does 4 years have to do with it? With even one year of high prices, you will lose a hell of a lot of money.
>Let's have an example number. For this example let's pretend prices went up 30%. If I say "relative to your income and savings, you're paying 25% more", I'm not saying "it's not so bad". That situation is really bad. I'm just saying it's not 30%.
>
>And it's important to realize that those numbers are different if we want to do accurate calculations about inflation. I'm not pointing out the difference for the sake of pedantry.
You are getting awfully pedantic. We talk about inflation in terms of price hikes because that's something that affects everyone. Accounting for all the inflation avoidance schemes and possible wage increases that people get to cope with inflation would require a different statistic. Those coping mechanisms are a red herring when it comes to the actual performance of our currency, which is what people actually care about.
They were complaining about being able to buy 30% less. I gave some reasons that isn't the case, that decreasing in spending power would be less than 30%.
I'm not saying anything "avoids" inflation, I'm saying they're exaggerating the problem.
And stop saying it doesn't matter. Those numbers being different values does matter.
A huge portion of your text is acting like it's a binary bad/not-bad, and then acting like I said it's not bad. I'm not saying that.
> Again, your money does not increase like this.
You don't have a significant amount of money. You have income, you have assets, you have debt.
Only the literal money changes 1:1 with inflation.
If you talk about what your "money" can buy when complaining about inflation, that's not literally the $500 in your checking account. It's not a complaint that you lost a few hundred dollars, one time, and nothing else changed. "money" in this sense is also talking about the bigger group of income and assets.
> You are getting awfully pedantic. We talk about inflation in terms of price hikes because that's something that affects everyone. Accounting for all the inflation avoidance schemes and possible wage increases that people get to cope with inflation would require a different statistic. Those coping mechanisms are a red herring when it comes to the actual performance of our currency, which is what people actually care about.
This comes so close to agreeing with me.
Yes, "different statistic". That's my fundamental argument. My entire point is that ein0p was conflating "inflation" with measurements of how much they can buy when those are different in a few important ways.
And by "schemes" I'm talking about a couple things that together affect the majority of people, not edge/corner cases.
>I'm not saying anything "avoids" inflation, I'm saying they're exaggerating the problem.
I can see why you might think that, but the problem isn't that they're stating it wrong. If they had $1000 that now buys $700, that is literally 30% less. You're bringing a bunch of tangential factors into this to try to say that the problem isn't that bad, but it is.
>A huge portion of your text is acting like it's a binary bad/not-bad, and then acting like I said it's not bad. I'm not saying that.
Well, your intention is certainly a binary for/against this idea. You're being extremely pedantic and persistent about saying essentially "It's not as bad as you think". Well, it actually is as bad as I think, and I have been thinking about it almost daily for like 4 years now.
>If you talk about what your "money" can buy when complaining about inflation, that's not literally the $500 in your checking account. It's not a complaint that you lost a few hundred dollars, one time, and nothing else changed. "money" in this sense is also talking about the bigger group of income and assets.
You're wrong to count other things besides currency as money. Inflation stats are specifically about currency. Roping anything else into it is a red herring. So far you have done two things that are distracting from this:
1. Grouping other assets into "money" that may go up because of inflation itself, or because of other factors like risk or business operations.
2. Wage or benefit increases that may or may not come, and certainly aren't guaranteed.
>Yes, "different statistic". That's my fundamental argument. My entire point is that ein0p was conflating "inflation" with measurements of how much they can buy when those are different in a few important ways.
There are too many individual circumstances to account for to come up with a statistic like that, and at that point you're measuring properties of individuals and not the monetary system. Even CPI, which measures sampling of prices in many categories, is very complicated. It is also heavily manipulated IMO.
>And by "schemes" I'm talking about a couple things that together affect the majority of people, not edge/corner cases.
I think you might have good intentions but ultimately you're ignoring a number of circumstances that do affect most people differently, as I have pointed out. The only thing that applies universally to all people is prices, and even then prices in different categories affect different people differently. I think the sampling for CPI is supposed to represent the typical consumer already.
What is the goal of these "better" stats which dodge the root of the problem for a majority of people, if not to understate the harm of reckless monetary policy? I'm of the opinion that the statistic that you want is pointless and would also be harmfully misleading if it was created. It might be ok if buried in some report for economists, but it isn't relevant to most people.
> Well, your intention is certainly a binary for/against this idea. You're being extremely pedantic and persistent about saying essentially "It's not as bad as you think". Well, it actually is as bad as I think, and I have been thinking about it almost daily for like 4 years now.
I'm not trying to minimize inflation. I'm saying that there are two numbers here that are not the same. If the impact was worse than the actual inflation number, I'd be saying that too.
Saying that two numbers are different is the exact opposite of reducing things to a binary. I'm arguing for a more complex analysis.
> You're wrong to count other things besides currency as money. Inflation stats are specifically about currency.
Please answer this question then:
Do you truly think the complaint I responded to was about the literal money that person held from 2020 until 2024, and nothing else? They weren't complaining about their income rising slower than inflation, their income was completely unrelated, they were only concerned with the loss from the exact amount of cash and bank balance they had during that time period? If inflation paused today, they were not complaining about any ongoing loss of purchase ability, just the one-time loss from the literal money they had?
If your answer is yes, then we've been talking past each other pretty badly.
But I really don't think that's what they meant. I think they were complaining about their own purchasing power in an overall sense.
> There are too many individual circumstances to account for to come up with a statistic like that
Has anyone tried? I think you could get some good graphs out of it. I agree that it shouldn't be reduced to a single percentage.
> What is the goal of these "better" stats which dodge the root of the problem for a majority of people
My only goal is to avoid overly simplistic numbers. And I don't see how what I'm saying "dodges the root of the problem". Inflation is still the primary factor!
So if it's actually 25-30%, that's a significant level of error but not an enormous one.
CPI says that, of those four years, almost all the inflation was in the middle two. So when it says 3.5% since last year, that's not a crazy number, it's more that it's hard to determine/remember which part of the inflation happened in exactly which month. Comparing today to 3-4 years ago is a better option for both accurate numbers and accurate memories.