Examining contributions to core consumer inflation measures

The purpose of this paper is to examine the composition of inflation over time. The authors calculate the contributions to inflation for individual series of the consumer price index (CPI) and personal consumption expenditures price index (PCEPI) and then aggregate those contributions into major consumer expenditure categories. This technique provides a wealth of information concerning aggregate inflation behavior in a concise way, enabling the authors to describe the composition of inflation at any point in time. A particularly important benefit of this method is that it allows them to distinguish broad-based changes in inflation from changes due to relative price movements of a few components. The authors examine long-term trends in contributions to PCEPI core inflation and make inferences about the direction of inflation in the near term. In addition, they examine the decline in CPI core inflation over the 2002–03 period and find that the decline was largely driven by relative price changes of two components.

When Did We Start Just Making Shit Up : Origins of U. S. Pseudocracy

Early in 2011, a colleague asked, “When did we start just making shit up?” By “we,” she meant Americans but also, more specifically, those involved in politics—directly or as in­terested parties. We an­swer her question variously in this paper.[1] But our overarching answer is that poli­ti­cos started flatly concocting misin­for­ma­tion when our propaganda polity mutated into a pseudocracy. We wend our way to that answer as follows. After reviewing an­swers we deem insuffi­cient, we provide two sorts of tentative, rough an­swers. Our first answer is that the stretch­ing of what counts as an untruth combined with the lengthening of political con jobs yielded “pseu­do­cracy,” a sys­tem in which falsehoods proliferate, both absolutely and as rela­tive to de­finable, defensible truth and honesty. Our second sort of answer is that be­fore “we” started just making shit up, propagandists in general and mass media, mass marketing, and mass elec­tion­eer­ing in particular started from and adhered to verifiable or at least plausible ren­derings of reality as much and as well as they could. Through the lat­­ter parts of the 20thcentury and continuing into the present century, we then argue, de­vel­op­­ments in old and new media, “advances” in marketing, and innova­tions in elec­tion­eer­ing evolved multiple ways in which to purvey untrue, misleading claims, shibboleths, in­nuendos, and propagandas [1] We take the “we” in her question to refer mainly to the United States polity as a whole, but we concede that the question might embrace subsets of that polity: 1) politi­cians and those who work with them and for them; 2) those who pay for politicians’ ser­vices and tell them what to do or what to say; 3) pundits, news-readers, media-performers who talk politics; 4) professional and amateur partisans and ideologues; 5) aca­dem­ics like us; or some combination of subsets one through five. We do not, however, take our colleague to have meant the person in the street. That person is more likely to repeat shit than to just make shit up, at least when it comes to politics

Examining contributions to core consumer inflation measures

The purpose of this paper is to examine the composition of inflation over time. The authors calculate the contributions to inflation for individual series of the consumer price index (CPI) and personal consumption expenditures price index (PCEPI) and then aggregate those contributions into major consumer expenditure categories. This technique provides a wealth of information concerning aggregate inflation behavior in a concise way, enabling the authors to describe the composition of inflation at any point in time. A particularly important benefit of this method is that it allows them to distinguish broad-based changes in inflation from changes due to relative price movements of a few components. The authors examine long-term trends in contributions to PCEPI core inflation and make inferences about the direction of inflation in the near term. In addition, they examine the decline in CPI core inflation over the 2002–03 period and find that the decline was largely driven by relative price changes of two components