{"id":3759,"date":"2010-10-28T06:47:51","date_gmt":"2010-10-28T14:47:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simonburrow.com\/\/?p=3759"},"modified":"2010-10-28T06:47:51","modified_gmt":"2010-10-28T14:47:51","slug":"the-cpi-is-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/?p=3759","title":{"rendered":"The CPI is Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is wrong.\u00a0 Among other things it doesn\u2019t measure product improvement or life style improvement.\u00a0 Paul Krugman the Princeton professor turned New York Times columnist uses CPI data to argue that the middle class is getting poorer.\u00a0 He wants the government to do something.\u00a0 Many people believe this myth about how we are getting poorer even though empirical data shows the opposite.<\/p>\n<p>For Example:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The expected life of a car has more than doubled in the past twenty years.\u00a0 The CPI hasn&#8217;t adjusted for this fact so it overstate the cost of transportation.<\/li>\n<li>Cell Phones didn&#8217;t exist when the CPI was designed in the 1970&#8217;s.\u00a0 Our lives have changed because of them the CPI measurement hasn&#8217;t noticed.<\/li>\n<li>Email and social media didn&#8217;t exist fifteen years ago.\u00a0 Now they are ubiquitous.\u00a0 They save time, money and improve communications the CPI doesn&#8217;t even know they exist.<\/li>\n<li>Flat monitors and HD TVs have made the TV experience much better while changing the configuration of our living rooms.\u00a0 Remember that beige CRT.\u00a0 How much is the extra two square feet of space on everybody&#8217;s desk worth? I estimate about a billion dollars.\u00a0 These changes aren&#8217;t reflected in the CPI.<\/li>\n<li>How much is it worth to have the internet at you finger tips?\u00a0 The CPI says zero.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Most of us are living much better than we did in 1980 and we would be living even better if the economic elitists would leave us alone to enjoy all of this neat new stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is wrong.\u00a0 Among other things it doesn\u2019t measure product improvement or life style improvement.\u00a0 Paul Krugman the Princeton professor turned New York Times columnist uses CPI data to argue that the middle class is getting poorer.\u00a0 He wants the government to do something.\u00a0 Many people believe this myth about how [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[71,47],"class_list":["post-3759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-simon-says","tag-economics","tag-entrepreneurs"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p99jGb-YD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3759"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3764,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3759\/revisions\/3764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}