Comments on: More on the CPI: The BLS Responds!

By: Barbara J Najera

Barbara J Najera — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 01:48:09 +0000

god bless your blog my friend

By: Leon B Walker

Leon B Walker — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:06:26 +0000

great article!, grats for u site

By: ounce of gold

ounce of gold — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:00:37 +0000

Working to improve CPI in a paper economy that's failing (due to government's incompetencies)? Time to invest in real money (i.e. gold / silver) rather than paper / FIAT money, which the government keeps on creating to make up for their overspending. (can you say “IRAQ WAR”?)

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 03:05:10 +0000

What I would like to see from the BLS is what their actual CPI adjustments are for improvements in specific products, for example the iPod. With each generation of the iPod, how much was the CPI lowered due to improvements in the product? I would be curious to know just how much better the BLS believes the iPhone 3G is than the original iPhone, in CPI terms.

By: Justin

Justin — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:02:19 +0000

Will, I wonder if you're being a bit too optimistic with the thought that once we know the neural correlates of affective quality, we'll be able to determine the increase value of consumer goods. Even if we could get that, there's the problem of moving from a pattern of affective qualities to an evaluation of the quality of a product. Consider the pepsi challenge, which famously worked because people initially preferred the higher sweetness of pepsi in a short blind taste-test, though most people failed to prefer it when drinking a 12oz can. In general, some products are going to have high initial novelty that is enjoyable, but might fade, others will have nagging imperfections that only become apparent over time, etc. Deciding how to weigh those factors is hard, even from the first-person!

So I think even given the presupposition that we can get a neurological measure of affective quality, there might be theoretically intractable problems about moving from that to a measure of product quality. Even more importantly, perhaps, these kind of considerations make me wonder about the practical problem of getting good enough measurements to evaluate products.

By: More on the CPI: The BLS Responds! : thegameoflove

More on the CPI: The BLS Responds! : thegameoflove — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 03:39:18 +0000

[...] Original Will Wilkinson [...]

By: Devin Finbarr

Devin Finbarr — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 02:13:38 +0000

Will,

How many times better is the average 2008 laptop than the average 2002 laptop? 5 times? 7.3 times? 1.4 times? The same? Worse ( thanks to Vista … )? If you can give me answer to this one question, then maybe I can be convinced that the CPI is worthwhile.

If you care about being scientific, subjective things should be kept subjective, and numerical things numeric. If you want to measure changes in the price level, restrict the basket to things where there has been little subjective changes in quality – a dozen eggs, a pound of flour, a barrel of crude oil, an ounce of gold, an acre of farmland, etc. If you mix objective numbers like these with entirely subjective guesses about changes in quality, all you do is completely ruin the objective numbers. The CPI becomes completely worthless and discussions about it dissolve into completely subjective discussions about quality of goods.