Everything else has fallen in price over the years
The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.
The way that economic data is presented, we often think of inflation as a singular number representing a general increase in prices.
For example, it might be reported that nominal GDP growth was 3%, and that inflation was 2%. Since the inflation represents a rise in price levels, we subtract it from the nominal rate to get a real GDP growth of 1%.
But in reality, price changes do not affect products and services in such a uniform and simple fashion. In the above example, all goods aren’t increasing in price at a 2% rate – that’s just an average. What really happens is that there is a full spectrum of price changes: some goods end up falling in price, while other goods get more expensive.
What’s Actually Getting More Expensive?
This week’s chart looks at the change in prices of consumer goods since 1996, using data provided by Mark J. Perry of AEI’s Carpe Diem blog.
This post was published at GoldSeek on Friday, 28 October 2016.
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