I would like to make a correction to my last post, if I may.The...

I would like to make a correction to my last post, if I may.

The BLS used to maintain separate samples of outlets and specific items for the U and W populations. However due to little variance in the movements between the CPI-U and CPI-W series and facing budgetary cuts they stopped some time ago from doing so. This means that the movements in all CPI-W basic indexes are now identical to those of their CPI-U counterparts.

A consequence of this, I suspect, is that they are now employing the same techniques when measuring price variations in both indexes.

Now another interesting thing.

"The first thing that stood out to me about Shadow Stats is that William's figures are usually a constant spread from the official government figures. The derivatives of the graph almost never vary.

It seems that John Williams does not actually recompute CPI. etc using the old techniques. What he does is take the current measurements, and then offsets them with a correction factor.

This correction factor is derived from some internal government document which was created around the time that the measure is changed.(e.g. someone writes a memo claiming that the new CPI will be X% lower). Hence, his system has the same problems that the new government measurements have, namely that they cannot meaningfully be compared with the original government measurements.

They are simply an alternate metric, and one of dubious quality."

As you can see you can replace the X in X% with whatever figure you like, may be 8%, 10%, 12% or 20% and be John Williams the Second.