So I was right again. Now, let's fix inflation measures.

There's a story on CNN Money today about shrinking and degrading products in response to inflation. Unfortunately, it doesn't give more than passing mention to the real stickler in inflation, the "degrading" part, which is harder for measurers to notice.

Consumers are discovering more air in their bag of chips, fewer sheets of paper towels on the roll, thinner garbage bags and even smaller squares of toilet paper. (emphasis mine)

You don't say! I've been noticing this for a while, and haven't been convinced the BEA and BLS capture the impact. When you pay the same for a debased product, that is price inflation, and precisely what you need to measure. But like the fool who won't search for his keys outside of the light, the BEA and BLS don't do the lab testing necessary to incorporate critical quality-related aspects of products.

In my personal experience, I have noticed cereal boxes and paper cups as being flimsier and thus harder to hold -- about as big an inconvenience as you can tag onto such a simple, trivial product. Soda bottles also had confoundingly irritating changes: in addition to the 25% vending machine price increase, they shrunk the cap height beyond all reason so that it's nearly impossible to get a good enough grip to twist open with your hands. The fact that Coca-Cola even made this decision is a testimony to either a) the low quality of their engineering teams, or b) how desperately they needed to debase the product. Neither is encouraging. (To their credit, the caps have returned to "good enough", meaning they've hidden the price increase somewhere else.)

I should feel fortunate to live in a country where "difficulty in opening products" ranks highly enough to complain about. But that's also worrying: in a country with such enormous, overflowing wealth (which the US has, right?) shouldn't producers have kept such noticeable inconveniences out as a matter of course? Something's not right about that picture...

So, if you really want to measure inflation, you're going to have to track these very tricky quality changes. But there's an alternative: focus on measures were this quality debasement just isn't possible. As I'm sure I've argued here and on several boards by now, the ideal candidate is an insulin index which does the work of policing quality improvements for you. If you debase insulin, someone dies. The other benefits are:

-Steady, predictable demand
-Global market with many buyers
-Many inputs, so it's immune to any one specific input's volatility
-No transient intellectual property effects

Which probably accounts for why such information is so durn hard to find!

Second, in addition to capturing quality degradations, they need to fundamentally rework how luxury-type items are accounted for. Those typically "scale" with what other people have. Faster computers mean enabling nicer software, but they can also mean having to pay for hardware I don't need, as the older stuff isn't available, and my current one can't run the latest software that assumes I have a faster machine. And the value I can squeeze out of it doesn't increase one-to-one with the MegaHertz rating!

I absolutely accept that modern technologies have vastly expanded the entertainment and learning options available to me, but an inflation measure must at the same time account for when food and energy prices put the squeeze on me.

I'd be interested in transforming these ideas into an academic paper, except there are a few things ahead on that list...