Government lies, aka statistics, conveniently ignore the cost of high quality items when doing averages. If you are buying eggs as a health conscious person, you know not to buy $1/dozen eggs any more because industry producers have made them low cost by reducing quality, feeding chickens soy and the cheapest excuse for food. The pastured ones are 5-10x the cost and the quality is night and day. US government conveniently views these things as staples, but they are not.
I think this sums it up well. People mostly don't know or care about how hedonic regression is used in CPI (myself included, on knowing). I don't think the process is easy to understand nor transparent (although I may be wrong here).
But BLS denies this assessment (and it's not 100% related to the article posted, but closely related to your comment I think):
> When the cost of food rises, does the CPI assume that consumers switch to less desired foods, such as substituting hamburger for steak?
> No. ...
> Is the use of "hedonic quality adjustment" in the CPI simply a way of lowering the inflation rate?
> No. ...
Obviously, they provide their own explanations, but I'm not going to paste the whole thing. This is definitely something I'd like to understand better though. Especially every time I complain about how Chewy Chips Ahoy or some other product I enjoyed in my childhood is absolute garbage now, and I don't buy the explanation that I simply had bad taste as a kid.
They also host this Quality Adjustment page to say which types of products do or don't have such adjustments: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/home.htm. So maybe this is transparency. I think it would take me 2+ hours on a weekend to really research this to understand it myself.
The BLS also produces an inflation research series called R-CPI-U-RS that does not make substitutions, and it's really not very different from the formal CPI series. [1]
Note that all of the data and methodology that goes into this is public and if there were any real, actually problematic substitutions, you'd know about it. The substitutions are good, actually, as they reflect changes in tastes. For instance, lobster and caviar used to be food for poor people. Should they be part of the CPI despite the fact they're rich people food now? Definitely not, that would massively overstate inflation.
> Especially every time I complain about how Chewy Chips Ahoy or some other product I enjoyed in my childhood is absolute garbage now, and I don't buy the explanation that I simply had bad taste as a kid.
Honestly, I buy that completely. We've known our tastes change as we get older. I used to hate tomatoes, now I love them. [2]
> Honestly, I buy that completely. We've known our tastes change as we get older. I used to hate tomatoes, now I love them.
I used to hate eggs, and now I love them, and I am aware of that change in my taste. The concept that tastes change is not new to me. I also used to love Oreos, and I still do. They do not taste significantly different. Chocolate chip cookies, in general, still taste good to me, especially slightly under-baked ones (which the "Chewy" Chips Ahoy resembled in texture when I enjoyed them as a kid).
The fact that, in current day, I would despise this one type of chocolate chip cookie that I used to like--and also while still enjoying other cookies and chocolate chip cookies, and fully understanding that tastes change--seems to be an absurd scenario compared to the distinct possibility that something changed in the way they make the cookies. Also, considering Kraft (which owned Nabisco which owned Chips Ahoy) split up in 2012, I'd be more surprised if they didn't decide to make changes to some of their recipes.
However, I do remember at one point trying baijiu (白酒), and it ruined the taste of sodas and diet sodas to me for several months. It was an abrupt but temporary change. No idea how that works, but the taste (really the smell) became unbearably similar to baijiu. Kind of want to try baijiu again now that I think about it.
