I keep hearing about inflation for food prices, but I haven't really noticed when I shop. Maybe Whole Foods has already been inflated? Gas is up, which is fine because fuck everyone who bought a giant truck last year.
Lots of stuff is not there at the store, but what's there didn't seem much more expensive.
Our Democratic Senator running for re-election is pushing a federal gas tax holiday and its pissing me off so much.
I guess natural gas prices are up a bunch. We've got our insulation on, so it's not a huge absolute increase though the percent increase is large.
1: Whole Foods was already inflated. I hear it from people who shop at cheaper places.
I had to buy a new washer and dryer. It's up $100-$200 over pre-pandemic. We got the brand we wanted (a tank of a machine that's made in the USA) but a lot of stuff was out of stock. Samsung was raising prices that week, and there are no sales. I bet that the prices are sticky and won't fall.
I had to repurpose my Elfa closet system when we moved and went to buy some pieces. Their usual 30% sale is now 20%, and the extra parts were much more than we thought they would be. We were converting a wall-hanging system to a free-standing one, but the person who helped us at the Container Store said that prices had gone up a lot in December 2020. Allegedly they don't plan on bringing back the 30% sales. If I were starting from scratch, I would pick a different system.
4: Our 10 day gas bill in January was $150. The people who heat with oil must be really struggling. We need to get an energy audit. Massachusetts will cover 3/4 of the cost of any recommended insulation if you do that.
I think the last two pairs are good matches. The others...meh. Agree with HG that most of the resemblances are superficial, coincidences in several areas at once, rather than deep. Like, if you described them to someone else they'd sound the same but the more closely you knew one of them the less the doppelgänger would convince you. Just last night going to kid 2's orchestra concert my wife guessed that the woman at the other end of the row might be the mother of kid2's girlfriend (we have not met the parents). Then an 10 year old girl sat down next to the putative girlfriend's-mom and there was no doubt. The two sisters have the exact same face in a way those photo pairs do not. [so I walked over and introduced myself - I'm not weird or anything].
I think the vast bulk of the inflation being ascribable to cars, homes, and gas speaks against "businesses joining in on the trend" being a big part of the picture. If it were, you'd see inflation more even evenly across expenditure categories, because most businesses across industries could join in on it (depending on market concentration).
The photos remind me of a different series in which the photographer would take a portrait and then a matching portrait photo of himself trying to match the expression. Not all of them were good matches, but the failures were sometimes interesting in illustrating how difficult it is.
Is it actually proven that low inflation is associated with stagnant wages and stupid-high returns on capital or does it just seem that way?
Anyway, we need to fix the lack of wage growth for younger workers before I'm the old people the kids are complaining about.
Also, I'm very bad with faces so I don't have an opinion about how well matched the people in the photos are. I will say that I don't think my siblings and I look especially alike in any way.
One argument in favor of corporate greed being the cause is that profits are at an all time high. But does that make sense? If inflation raises costs 5%, and you have a fixed profit margin, won't you make 5% more nominal sales and therefore have 5% higher nominal profit? I guess if real corporate profits were at a record it would be good evidence.
14: FRED gives a 55% nominal increase over the past 5 years, which would still be a big increase after adjusting for inflation. But plenty other systemic explanations.
That looks like a huge jump to me.
I thought the conversation between Ezra Klein and Jason Furman about inflation was good: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jason-furman.html?showTranscript=1
ezra klein:: Let's drill in on the inflation. So there are a couple schools of thought on what this inflation is and why we have it. Do you want to just describe as fairly as you can what the sides in the debate are?
jason furman:Sure. One side focuses on what I would call a microeconomic bottom-up perspective, and it tries to explain the anomalous things about different prices. For example, used cars. All the car rental companies dump their fleets in 2020. They needed to put fleets together this year. At the same time, there aren't a lot of microprocessors and used car prices have gone up. You can then tell other stories like that.
From that perspective, these are a sequence of anomalies, most of them caused by the pandemic. And as the pandemic goes away, the anomalies will go away. And there's a good reason why the freakish price increases, like in used cars, will go away. That micro bottom-up perspective has tended to be more sanguine, has tended to see a slowdown in inflation right around the corner.
The second perspective is more of a macro top-down perspective. And it says people have a lot of money to spend. We don't quite know what they're going to spend it on. Maybe they'll spend it on cars. Oh, if there aren't enough cars, then they'll spend it on something else. And this will all express itself somehow in prices being higher, because people overall want to spend more than the economy is able to produce. And when aggregate demand is too high, aggregate supply is too low, you'll see inflation.
From a macro perspective, you're worried that we might have more inflation this year, because labor markets are tighter now than they were a year ago. Inflation expectations matter a lot. They're higher now than they were a year ago. Wage increases are economywide. It's not just a used car thing. That will pass through. And that macro perspective would say maybe even expect more inflation in 2022 than 2021.
continued
jason furman:So here's where the two hypotheses will differ and how we can distinguish between them. And the question is, what happens to prices in the non-freakish areas over the next year? So one mental exercise is what would inflation be if used car prices hadn't gone up so much and everything else was exactly the same? That's the micro-perspective.
The macro-perspective says what if used car prices didn't go up so much, maybe people would have had more money to spend on something else and some other price would have gone up. Or to make a prediction over the next year, it would say that service price inflation is going to be faster over the next year than it was over the last year. So yes, the freakish stuff on the goods side will end, but now people will have more money to spend on services. We'll see more inflation there.
And one of the issues is services are so much bigger than goods. So it only takes a one percentage point increase in the inflation rate for services to undo a five percentage point reduction in goods. So that to me is the big difference. Do you think of your story as in everything else being equal, which is the micro-story, or as, yes, you deflate the balloon here, but it pops up there. That's the macro-story. And the way to distinguish will be to look at service prices over the next year.
I don't think my sister and I look alike much at all, other than a certain squareness about the jaw, which you can't really see on me at the moment because I have a beard and am overweight.
However, my sister posted a photo on Facebook today where she looks like someone has done one of those computer vision morphs between two faces to see what their child would look like. She looks remarkably like both our mother and our father. Similarly, _I_ look a lot like my father* but not that much like my sister. We clearly share different resemblances with each of our parents.
* although my mother doesn't think so
I never hear about increased costs of consumer goods from the Trump tariffs. Are those still in place? Is there no price consequence from them?
I think "who looks like which parent" is endlessly interesting, but annoyingly my sister stopped at two kids so we will never get to p
Oh yeah the less-than bug.
p less than 0.05
I feel like the Furman argument assumes a fact not in evidence - that people are spending more on cars than before. I know that's happening anecdotally in places where transit has worsened during the pandemic, but we had a pretty high car ownership rate beforehand; for most people, cars are just a regular expense. How much of the vehicle inflation is due to people spending their stimulus checks to replace their car (as he implies) vs. the same stream of people steadil;y replacing their cars but not finding the supply?
I heard on the news that when the chip supply became limited, car manufacturers chose to only make luxury cars. So the only available new cars are real pricey.
That would line up with people spending more on cars, even if they aren't buying more.
How much of the vehicle inflation is due to people spending their stimulus checks to replace their car (as he implies) vs. the same stream of people steadil;y replacing their cars but not finding the supply?
I don't know, but here's what a quick google turns up.
"U.S. new vehicle sales rebounded slightly last year from 2020′s dismal numbers, but were still about 2 million below the years before the coronavirus pandemic." ref
"Cox Automotive estimated that used-car sales finished 2021 at 40.9 million vehicles, an increase of about 10 percent over 2020." ref
So that sounds like total new + used was similar to pre-pandemic or maybe slightly higher (new was down 2M, and used was up 4M from the low point).
A progressive economist and former Warren staffer says that part of the reason for inflation is corporations taking advantage to just raise prices and increase profits. She says they are bragging about it on earnings calls for investors, and cites several in the linked thread.
Monopolies are also part of the issue, IMO. The Biden administration just announced steps they are taking regarding the four big meatpacking companies, which are regularly accused of price-fixing.
26: Yeah, I heard the meat packing companies were making record profits. Because the meat I eat comes from the meal kits I get, I don't notice meat prices. Also, the fancy company I ordered from was buying organic meat, and I think that gets packed elsewhere.
If it's Butcher Box, probably Australia. I had to do a ton of digging to find that out, back at the beginning of the pandemic. They don't make it easy to learn.
If it's Butcher Box, probably Australia. I had to do a ton of digging to find that out, back at the beginning of the pandemic. They don't make it easy to learn.
Iowa is the only state where "Employees must wash hands after using restroom" laws are directly forbidden in the state constitution.
From inside the board games industry, I can tell you that some of what's going on is that companies are finally moving MSRPs, after making locals eat their increases for a few years. So to the consumer, it's a big jump, but to the retailer, it's a return of prices to historical average markups.
One popular game line has held to a nominal $50 price on their boxes, but each year they've increased the amount they charge retailers by a dollar or two, squeezing the retailer's margins - it's very hard to sell products for more than the price listed on the box, but for a popular enough product you come to accept that you now have to sell 4 products to pay for an hour's wages, etc., rather than 3. The spate of "inflation is here" stories seems to have given the company the courage to change the MSRP on the box to $60, which basically restores the decrease in margins they've been shoving onto stores for the last few years.
(As a round number slightly exaggerated example, perhaps 10 years ago the $50 game would cost us $27 to buy from distribution, steadily increasing to $35 last year. The jump to $60 MSRP for the same $35 game means that it's back to a margin of about 42%, still below the 46% of 10 years ago.)
29 and 30: The meal kits are from Sunbasket. I'm not buying meat on its own for the most part.
They use every part of the kangaroo. Mostly used as an export.
I'm not sure the people in the second picture actually look more similar to each other than like 1/3rd of lesbian couples.
A couple weeks ago when I went in for my face surgery consult, they took a bunch of pictures and did some crude Photoshop-type morphing on the spot to show me what the end results might be. They went feature by feature, it was interesting, and then suddenly there was a complete gestalt shift and I was looking at an image of my sister. I had never thought we resembled each other much. Not like there'd be identity confusion in real life or anything, but the effect was profound.
Honestly, my sisters are both hotter than me.
Mom didn't have to mention it in the Christmas letter though.
On the OP - resemblance is weird. My best friend here also works at the university. She and I don't look that much alike, but we are the same height, have curly hair, and blue eyes, so if someone (colleague, school mom) doesn't really know us, it's easy to get us confused or assume we're sisters (because we work at the same school?)
But we're good friends and her kid and the Calabat are small ruffly haired boys about the same age/height, and the kids are close and I'm sort of a surrogate aunt, so trying to explain to Birthday Party Acquaintance that, no, I'm not Friend, but our kids are friends and then when person deduces that the small kid who ran up to me and gave me a hug must therefore be my kid and not Friend'skid.....
So my point is I think context does a lot. Also people who are looking to find resemblance in siblings should look at bone structure.
People talk about bone structure, but once you get past 45, cartilage is much more important.
42: Sharks need to keep getting plastic surgery or they'll die.
32 describes something I've been suspecting. A lots of prices are fairly sticky, so they inflate by 0% for a few years at a time, then jump. Normally the jumps are independent between industries, so it's noisy and averages out. But right now, for obvious reasons, everybody's taking their jump now.
That's not to discount monopoly/corporate greed stories, but to describe how their effects get amplified by market actors who aren't necessarily racking up huge profits by raising prices, but whose actions have coordinated because of the last 2 years.
Anyway, the main inflation I've seen is in coffee. I don't drink coffee at all, but AB and Iris do. In the before times, AB got it either from Whole Foods or from the local place. But COVID shut down the latter for good, and we've basically stopped shopping WF since COVID began*. As a result, I now buy all the coffee as part of my shopping (from a different, venerable local place). In the 2 years I've been buying, it's gone from $9.99 to $11.99 a pound. That's a big increase! But honestly, I'm hyper aware of prices, and I haven't seen much change in anything else I buy. Soda and LaCroix, I guess.
*we really only got a handful of things there; when the lines got stupid long, we just sourced them elsewhere. Now the lines are gone, but the Amazon-ization of the store makes it so unpleasant** that it literally puts me in a foul mood to buy anything from there (which I every once in awhile do, bc no place else that's open has Item X, or bc I'm already at the state store across the parking lot).
**all windows are blocked by coolers and shelves for their delivery/curbside services; half the people in the store are miserable gig shoppers; the shelves remain pathetically spotty; no more free samples, although both those and the muffins had drastically declined in quality even pre-2020.
44: The sneaky coffee inflation is in the amount of coffee they sell you. I get coffee delivered once a month from a mid-tier MA roaster. I was in Vermont and bought some really delicious coffee and looked into ordering from them. Their price was not much higher, but my place sold bigger bags.
46: A very satisfying aspect of my coffee-buying experience is their method: after you tell them what you want, they label a bag with the price, then weigh out the exact amount you requested into a huge, specialty bowl that sits on the scale and is shaped kind of like a gravy boat to pour it into the bag. Seeing them shake in just enough beans to make 1.00 pounds pleases me every time.