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This is basic statistics. When certain data points skew things too much you just remove them! 
bourgeois economics is Big Boy Science
Who needs energy or shelter anyways.
Also what is this even supposed to tell you about? That candles and fighter jets didn't get more expensive?
If you exclude the things that makes living expensive, living isn't more expensive is a great point, good job Paul.
Inflation can be defeated on shelter and food completely by simply sleeping in a Walmart parking lot and foraging for food out of dumpsters. I am very smart.
Yeah I like to exclude the biggest contributor to things too 
This reminds me of that sports copypasta/meme; “If you take [star athlete] and ignore the top twenty percent of their performances as outliers and then do a regression analysis, you’ll see they’re actually an average athlete for their position.”
Core price inflation. CORE PRICE INFLATION. CPI. CORE. PRICE. INFLATION. (excluding such outliers as fucking food)
I hate these people I hate them so much how can you be such a huge dork and wrong literally all of the god damn time and be so evil I hate them I hate them I am going insane where does he live what is his address and favorite restaurant and preferred route to and from work I am going to 
so hard I am going to make 
look like a fucking liberal
Tell that to my local grocery store then. Prices have definitely not fallen there and that's where it hurts many people the most
iirc this is the rate of change of price not a change in price graph so as long as that little line is above zero prices rise and that's by intent. That number going below 0 by too much for too long is generally an indication that something is very wrong.
I haven't taken an economics course in 2 years though so I could be wrong here
5 dollars a loaf
well yeah the turbolib excluded food prices from his graphsturbation
“If you only look at things that don’t matter, inflation has slowed. Prices have not dropped back to previous levels, the rate of rise has just slowed.”
CPI hasn't been in the negatives, so everything is still more expensive than before. Thus, inflation remains undefeated. Common capitalist L.
Compare this to a graph of 'increase/decrease in wages' over the same period of time. If wages did not increase, then this inflation affects people remarkable. The price increases are cumulative over time. If someone's wages have not increased then it doesn't matter if inflation slows down or even stops completely, their relative level of income and direct material well-being has gone down.
We can even make this more nuanced. Rather than look at average wages that can be affected by extreme outliers or just an economy where high earners get a lot more relative to the rest of the population, we could instead look at median wages or quintiles for more granularity. This inflation might not be seen or even affect the bug eating Karen PMC. However, it may be massively painful for a subsection of the population who's wages have stagnated. Even if this segment was a minority, it would be incredibly tone deaf and ignorant to ignore their plight and just focus on the whole population. The issue at hand would then be distribution of wealth - but liberals of course like to ignore that at every opportunity. Enjoy your worsening material consulting, serf. Middle management and shareholders gotta get paid.
I don't think I get inflation.
When econ dorks say inflation has "been defeated" it doesn't mean prices go back down, right? Inflation is a rate of change, so when inflation goes down prices just get more expensive at a slower rate.
Once inflation happens it's basically locked in forever. Prices are sticky. So unless wages catch back up, buying power is permanently decreased right?
So, once inflation is defeated, nothing actually gets more affordable. It just stops getting less affordable. Am I right?
The theory is that inflation is defeated and things get more affordable when wages are rising faster than inflation. What if you're making minimum wage, the legislated rate of which doesn't rise faster than inflation you ask? Simply get another job
This is what economists actually believe
But economists also believe rising wages are causing inflation, which contradicts the very concept of wages rising faster than inflation.
It's like their entire field is made up or something.
Yea it's comical when you see pie charts of how revenue actually breaks down between costs and profits and some asshole is pointing to the 10% wage labour slice saying that it drives the ship and not the 30% shareholder profit slice
shareholder profits are only x3 higher than actual labor costs? crazy
That's an estimation. Some companies may be that profitable, but the economy overall in the US is less.
The more important point is that profit is an assumed good, an end worthy of itself. No liberal economist is ever going to tell you a business or economy is too profitable: that's the point of all this. Thus when a firm raises prices to sustain or increase it's rate of profit, that's just business; a decision so basic as to escape scrutiny. But if labor demands more pay/benefits and eats into the rate of profit? Well now that's driving up inflation! Those greedy workers just don't know when they've got enough! Pay no attention to the decision by Capital to raise prices to sustain the rate of profit, that's the only reasonable thing they could do! Their privilege in society must be preserved!
We could get off this stupid treadmill if we nationalized mature industries and ran them at cost for the public good - but there's no profit in that, so what's the point?
Capitalist economics is a religious belief system that is not meaningfully related to actually existing economies. That's the most succinct explanation of capitalist economics i can write down.
Yes, but don't let the proles hear that or they might demand compensation.
thinking about how measures from the very first dictatorship of the bourgeoisie [well okay maybe second if we're going to count a*glos] are heresy in the modern bourgeois ideology.
a fucking single price control on bread would immediately reduce the cost of living, and be massively popular. leveraging the subsidized food markets (the government is already interfering!) you could shave off hefty proportions of folks' food bills, and get fucking swept into office next year.
high priest of capitalism showing his ass again
What's left then? Luxury goods?
treats are back on the menu!
Things that put you in debt in order to possess. You know, basic needs. Gotta stimulate this strong economy!
It never occurred to me that "largely" could be a liberal/neoliberal weasel word.
Is this a joke?
economists are clergy
thank you Mr. Krugman, very cool
If I had pulled shot like this in a Bachelor’s lab course, I would have not just failed the experiment but the entire course.
The inflation is mostly supply chain problems that are unfixable in the medium to long term, im not a final crisis guy but its starting to shape up that way. The other question is who will restore profitability post crash China is running out if growth they dint have double digit growth they cant save the west like they did in 2008, India cant do it either for reasons that they never mulched their peasantry and are actively hostile to any liberalization market reforms. Even if this ended ups in a crisis the left broadly speak needs to handle the ongoing crisis with institutions that have yet to be built. That sorta means we won't get any power except as a response to disaster, a politics of nessecity and that can be really bad.
Learn how to integrate nerd. Is math foreign to this dude?
Even if this included the biggest contributors, it'd still be a massive increase in prices. Fucking jackasses are so bad at graphing, if they were actually trying to show shit they'd be showing the change in the cost/wage ratio. The concept of normalization and useful statistics is so foreign to these jackoffs.
Motherfucker should be banned from touching excel or a real graphing software ever again.
Holy shit I just found out this asshole's a professor. AN EX STANFORD/MIT PROF. If I tried to pull this shit my PI would have my summarily executed. ECONOMICS DOESN'T GET TO BE A SCIENCE IF YOU MAKE EVERYTHING UP. READ MARX AND KILL YOURSELF KRUGMAN
It's silly to present only this graph, then. Surely it's possible to put a dashed line next to this one that includes the "lagging" measures and just stops where the data stops or becomes unreliable, but would still show the trend(s).
Or hell show each component as a different line, maybe faded some, and end each line where the data become questionable, and put the composite line darker/bolder. Lots of good options.
If we're back at/near the target 2%, that does count as "defeated" from the point of view of the monetary policy makers. But I'd need to see complete inflation data to be certain. If we're missing inflation data because it "lags," then we'll know one way or another later.
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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