alt Hacker NewsThe basket is dogshit, but not for the reason you probably think. Our lives improved tremendously by technology: internet, smartphone, videogames, netflix & co, medical progress, online shopping of any goods you can possible imagine, ability to travel the world for cheap.
The problem with the CPI basket is, it needs to be constant of products to be comparable, so NO technological advancement is considered in that basket. Instead, they use the price of butter and tomatoes. Well, a fictious 1950s person wouldn't care that is can buy more butter or tomatoes than we can, but would want smartphone and a plane ticket to thailand.
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I'm sorry but videogames and Netflix have done exactly nothing for my quality of life. In fact, I wish there were less of both, and multiple other things you listed. I think we have a significantly different understanding of quality.
> Our lives improved tremendously by technology
Aside from technological and scientific progress in the medical field, it's generally been shown that people's lives have gotten worse.
Funny, for me it seems terrible exactly for the opposite reason. These kinds of baskets are too heavily weighted by things that go relatively down in costs like technology and airplane tickets.
The monetary reason is that the reason those things go down is because of technology advances and not because of changes in the value of the currency. Inflation should be about the currency, and less about what cool advances people are doing to make cheaper TVs and better websites
The practical reason is that if the basics like rent and food go up relative to wages, then a lot of people end up crushed by the basics alone and have no disposable income left for the cool stuff. The baskets are often too biased towards spending patterns of those who live the good life and for whom luxuries actually matter