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发帖数: 26222 | 1 What is the True Level of U.S. Inflation? Is it as High as 8%?
From Mike Moffatt, About.com Guide March 12, 2008
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I have been hearing from a number of people that inflation 'feels' higher
than the reported statistics. While I do not believe there is a "true" value
of inflation (because inflation is somewhat of an arbitrary construct), I
do have the same gut feeling. Perhaps it is because the inflation figures
often reported are of "core" inflation, that is inflation for people who
neither eat nor heat, and this inflation is running lower than economy-wide
inflation.
Anyhow, I stumbled upon Is US inflation at 8%? - it makes some interesting
points, including the following:
The first thing to notice is that inflation is not an observable real
world variable, such as the number of widgets produced by a factory.
Inflation is a statistic - technically a mapping from a probability space of
random events into the positive real numbers. To arrive at a statistic, i.e
. a number, we have to take multiple decisions, such as which sample of
goods to include in our basket, since we cannot measure the universe of
prices. We also have to choose a method how to weigh the results
mathematically. You might remember the Paasche or Laspeyres price indices
taught in Economics 101. In particular, we have to choose what to put into
the basket, and what not.
...The RPI, the retail price index, is still used today by ordinary
people as their favourite measure of inflation (and also by wage negotiators
). It has been significantly higher than the CPI, the index targeted by the
Bank of England.
The reason for this discrepancy is, of course, related to what we put
into the basket and to the adjustments we choose to make. We make lots of
adjustments. If the price of a family computer at your local hardware costs
€1000 today, and €1000 in one year's time, we calculate this as
a fall in prices, because the quality of the computer has presumably
increased. I have problems with this now ubiquitous concept of hedonistic
pricing because we are double-counting. The improvement in quality is the
result of a rise productivity - which is a real variable. So the improvement
in quality raises nominal growth in the numerator, and it lowers the price
in the denominator, in other words, we double-count the effect. It may well
be that we have been consistently underestimating the rate of inflation, and
overestimating the rate of real productivity growth. Since the US uses the
hedonic pricing more consistently than the Europeans (I think, please
correct me if I am wrong on this one), the problem would be worse in the US
than in Europe |
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