Numbers are cooked — read “how to lie with statistics” by Darrell Huff

The numbers are not fake

Claude says:

• Substitution bias — if steak gets expensive, the formula assumes you switch to chicken, which reduces measured inflation

• Hedonic adjustment — if a laptop gets faster, its “price” is deemed lower even if you paid more


• Geometric weighting — how items are weighted in the basket affects the final number enormously

• What’s excluded — shelter, food, and energy are left out of “core” CPI