Yes, if you cherry pick a few things that are disproportionately going up in price and say inflation should be calculated based solely on those things then you can make the numbers look worse. Or the reverse if you cherry pick things that are going down in price. I don't think either of those would be a more reasonable approach than looking at CPI.
It's not a "cherry pick" - the critique is specifically about the asset bubble. Owning assets is what it takes to be economically enfranchised in our system. Even though the asset bubble encompasses much more than just housing, I was meeting you halfway by focusing on where the asset bubble connects to the CPI metric. But with this response it seems as if you're intentionally trying to dodge the issue by focusing on the CPI.
I guess I would just disagree and say that having money makes you "economically enfranchised" by definition. That's why I'm talking about CPI.
If you ignore CPI in favor of solely looking at who can afford to buy real estate in big cities ("areas with active economies") then yes, perhaps things have gotten worse, but I'm saying that's the wrong metric to be looking at.
It's not a wrong metric, but rather it is highly relevant - the ideal of individual home ownership has long been a staple of the American middle class. That its attainability has changed is worth focusing on.
It's good that most people can still afford food, toiletries, and other sundry expenses. But it's not really relevant to this conversation. And if this does change as well, that will be a different discussion.
Nobody is denying it's relevant, that's why it's tracked as part of the CPI. All the goods and services measured by CPI are a "staple of American middle class", that's why they're on that list in the first place. Some are getting more expensive, some are getting cheaper. Singling out one that happens to be getting more expensive and pointing to that in isolation as evidence of material harm, while dismissing the others as "not relevant to this conversation" is missing the forest for the trees. Money is fungible; if you find yourself spending less in one category then you can afford to spend more in another with no net impact on your finances.
Housing prices are certainly an interesting topic worthy of their own discussion, but this is a thread about a group of middle class Americans becoming more wealthy. It's incorrect to measure wealth solely in terms of property ownership while ignoring everything else.
You're denying its relevant right here. For starters, the cost of home ownership is not tracked by the CPI - rather rent and equivalent rent are.
If we're discussing wealth, that means something different than merely a level of income and expenses, but rather having resources (including saved resources) that give one economic power to make their own (usually better) choices. Being able to afford food and sundries is not wealth. Even buying premium brands or not worrying about sales does not imply wealth in and of itself. Being able to rent, even a nicer/bigger apartment than strictly necessary, is not wealth. Being able to buy a home, where you're now making larger-scale economic decisions (rather than merely accepting whatever your landlord has decided), that is wealth. And one of the bedrock assumptions of our capitalist economy is having this kind of distributed wealth where individuals are making decisions over their little domains - eg do I install these solar panels that will cost me much more money than I am paying for electricity right now, but will pay me back over a period of 10 years.
This ties back to the failings of framing the CPI - big ticket purchases are infrequent and thus statistically making up a smaller portion of an average. But when an individual is staring them down, that increased big-ticket price becomes acutely relevant. When consumers then tend to settle for cheaper options, the aggregate amount spent goes down and the price inflation is then not reflected in the CPI. As just another metric we could give this a pass for the inherent difficulties of measuring such things. But as the metric is a critical part of the feedback path for monetary creation, it's exactly those shortcomings that become magnified.
Yes it is. CPI already takes those things into account. If you ignore all other living costs in favor of just looking at those three things because they're the things that are going up the most then you're not getting an accurate measurement of purchasing power.
