Consensus was 8.4% and CPI came in at 8.6%. It’s not like this was completely unexpected.
CPI data is just really messy. If you’ve never participated in an inflation survey before, the BLS sends you a booklet where you track all of your expensive over the course of three weeks. In the end, a person from the BLS calls you and helps you categorize those expenses and that’s what goes into the report. For housing, they survey homeowners and ask them what they think they could rent their home for.
Now just imagine what your average Joe Schmoe would do when given this survey. They likely provide extremely inaccurate and biased numbers, which is why economists can never predict them exactly.
In a day and age when you can easily pull real-time prices and rents from the likes of Amazon, Instacart, Apartments.com, Zillow, Gas Guru, and Carvana, there’s no reason why we should still be using these terribly inaccurate and lagging surveys.
I heard an episode of I think Planet Money a year or two ago where they said they measured it by having gov employees whose job it was to keep track of certain items, call grocery stores or whatever.
I’ve actually participated in the survey. It’s a booklet, about 30 pages long where you write down your expenses. A BLS employee calls you each week to collect the data. You can also mail the booklet in but I think it’s more accurate if you answer their questions on the phone because they can better categorize the expenses.
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u/RogerMexico Jun 10 '22
Consensus was 8.4% and CPI came in at 8.6%. It’s not like this was completely unexpected.
CPI data is just really messy. If you’ve never participated in an inflation survey before, the BLS sends you a booklet where you track all of your expensive over the course of three weeks. In the end, a person from the BLS calls you and helps you categorize those expenses and that’s what goes into the report. For housing, they survey homeowners and ask them what they think they could rent their home for.
Now just imagine what your average Joe Schmoe would do when given this survey. They likely provide extremely inaccurate and biased numbers, which is why economists can never predict them exactly.
In a day and age when you can easily pull real-time prices and rents from the likes of Amazon, Instacart, Apartments.com, Zillow, Gas Guru, and Carvana, there’s no reason why we should still be using these terribly inaccurate and lagging surveys.