re: #553 Gus 802

That works. I seem to remember the price controls he instituted.

Those last two paragraphs hit close to the mark, notwithstanding the poor reliability of Newsweek…

By the mid-1990s, while stodgier central bankers in Europe and Britain still clung to old-fashioned headline inflation to guide policy, the United States was rolling out “hedonic adjustments” that used technological breakthroughs to justify adjusting inflation estimates downward, even when advances like faster computer processors didn’t touch most people’s lives, let alone boost their spending power. And just in case technology didn’t bring prices down fast enough, the United States enthusiastically embraced “substitution effects,” opting to measure hamburger prices instead of steak if steak prices rose unpalatably. Even a boom in house prices could be negated simply by choosing to count slow-rising apartment rents instead of soaring home values.

So what to do if governments can’t be trusted to get the data right? Try doing it yourself. To this end, the United Kingdom’s national statistics office offers a personal inflation calculator on its Web site that lets consumers create their own index based on personal observations. As Groucho Marx might have said, “Who are you going to believe—the Fed or your own eyes?”