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What are the different inflation indexes?
Different government agencies produce a lot of different price indexes. Broadly speaking, these indexes all show the same large-scale trends over time. Inflation was high in the 1970s and has been low recently. Electronics have gotten cheaper and medical care has gotten more expensive. But the indexes measure somewhat different things, and do diverge over time and are especially likely to diverge over longer spans of time. Indexes differ in the following main ways: What population do they cover? Are they “chained” or “unchained”? How do they treat owner-occupied housing? What goods do they cover?…Read More