Sure, but inflation should be viewed as individual vectors.
Each vector corresponding to a delta of price and time in a generalized location for a specific good.
Something like the CPI cannot be a hard science as it refuses to acknowledge that each and every person will experience inflation based on the inflationary vectors of goods and services multiplied by a persons relative use of said goods and services.
Every person experiences a unique inflation rate, and to try and average that in something as wholly simplistic as a basket of goods is pure chicanery aimed at making this topic intractable.
That would be the cost of living for a particular person. Inflation is not that. It's literally a change in the price level of an economy, and what they are trying to measure is exactly that.
Yes, the average of the above for the entire economy. I agree, but the methodology of CPI does not at all match anything grounded in the averaging of the above logic.
A proper measure of inflation should start from the individual level and reason from there.
So if on average 1 loaf of bread is bought by a US consumer and a loaf of bread's rate of inflation is increasing(or even decreasing) by %x, and that's %y of the average consumer's expenditure, then that should contribute %x*%y of the overall inflation rate experienced by the average American consumer.
Clearly this is a complex line of reasoning, but it should be the basis of thought on measuring inflation. Yet, housing and medical expenditure are not even considered in CPI. CPI is a terrible measure that I believe was designed to obfuscate.
Housing and health expenditure are listed as components of the CPI [0], so it's almost certain that they're included in its calculation.
Again, inflation means an increase in the general price level. An increase in the price of bread is not inflation, because the price of bread is not the price level. It can be used as a data point to try to estimate a change in the price level, but by itself it doesn't tell us anything about the inflation rate (unless of course bread is the only good being produced in the economy).
Each vector corresponding to a delta of price and time in a generalized location for a specific good.
Something like the CPI cannot be a hard science as it refuses to acknowledge that each and every person will experience inflation based on the inflationary vectors of goods and services multiplied by a persons relative use of said goods and services.
Every person experiences a unique inflation rate, and to try and average that in something as wholly simplistic as a basket of goods is pure chicanery aimed at making this topic intractable.