"It wouldn't surprise me if the inflation figures printed by the government are understated, whether intentionally or unintentionally."
And it would not surprise me if whoever said that is more wrong than right. I say this because I know about something that by far the vast majority of posters seem not to know about, which is this:
The Billion Prices Project: Using online data for measurement and research.
n 2007, the BPP initiated Inflación Verdadera, a project that provided a daily inflation gauge for Argentina, serving as an alternative to the official consumer price index which was manipulated by the government during 2007-2016.."
".And I thought it might be worth telling people something they may not know about the history of MIT’s Billion Prices Project.If you’ve been following the sad story of America’s inflation truthers, you know that a variety of people — angry billionaires like Paul Singer, wannabe economic pundits like Niall Ferguson, etc. — have claimed in recent years that official US statistics vastly understate inflation. There are multiple ways to show that this is nonsense, but one of the easiest is to point to the Billion Prices data, collected independently from online prices, and note that while it doesn’t track the official CPI exactly — the basket of goods sold online doesn’t exactly match the coverage of the CPI — there is not a large, persistent discrepancy:
