>What drives you to defend the CPI?

What drives you to question the motives of the commenter rather than responding to his arguments directly?

He's right, defending the CPI calculation is almost criminal. Many people on fixed incomes that are adjusted based on the CPI are negatively affected. This bogus formula will be conveniently altered to stay under 2% if inflation creeps into the basket of goods being calculated.

>He's right

Perhaps, but the right way to approach this is to point out the factual errors, rather than making thinly veiled insinuations that his opponent is a shill for the BLS or whatever.

>defending the CPI calculation is almost criminal

Ah yes, because the only possible explanation for why people don't hold the same beliefs as you is because they're acting with malice.

For this and the previous point I refer you to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, namely:

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

Assume good faith.

>Many people on fixed incomes that are adjusted based on the CPI are negatively affected. This bogus formula will be conveniently altered to stay under 2% if inflation creeps into the basket of goods being calculated.

All this does is provide a motive for why CPI might be wrong, but stops short of providing evidence or counter-arguments.

> making thinly veiled insinuations that his opponent is a shill for the BLS or whatever.

That was definitely not what I was doing at all. If I am giving off that impression then that’s my mistake but this is purely a curiosity.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

> Assume good faith.

Please do me the same courtesy friend. This is out of a genuine curiosity for knowledge.

I have no intention of refuting his arguments. I have no strong position on the value of the CPI. OTOH I’ve noticed repeated vociferous defenses of the CPI across various Internet forums which seems out of the ordinary for me, so I’m naturally curious in what drives it. This is not trying to dismiss his argument, I just want to understand from where it’s coming because I think I’m missing something.

I have occasionally come to the defence of CPI in several threads. What drives is usually that the critic shows little knowledge about that the CPI is and/or how it's actually calculated. There are real technical issues with CPI estimations. But forum and blog posts rarely reach beyond the level of "everything I bought/want to buy is getting more expensive faster than the CPI, so it must be bogus".

It triggers me in a similar way, I think, as comments like "my (sisters'/neighbours') kid got really sick after his vaccination, so vaccines are very dangerous". A small number of people really do get sick after (and sometimes even from) vaccines, and probably no amount of research will override their personal experience. But it's a bit disheartening if the level of discourse never rises much above personal experiences.

This is because media and government (in various computations) use CPI when talking about inflation, so it is natural for them to become used interchangeably.

Since CPI doesn't reflect inflation, it is natural to criticize it for failing at that. Maybe it was never meant to reflect inflation, but that seems about as futile as trying to argue for the proper, original meaning of the term "hacker", not what media made it to be.