A reader sends me this chart, which was included in an article about "soaring" food prices:
Here's a bigger chart that shows a wider variety of food:
I need to be clear here: I don't object to reporting about high food inflation. At 5.4%, the overall inflation rate of food is high right now. But if you cherry pick your data to show only the items that have gone up the most, then by definition you're playing with loaded dice. It's like presenting a chart showing the prices of BMWs, Porsches, and Cadillacs and pretending that it shows the average price of cars.
In the top chart, if you glance quickly at the middle because that seems like it's probably the average, you'd think overall food prices are up 15% or more. That's wrong. Conversely, if you show your readers the lower chart, they'd probably figure that food prices are about 4-5% higher than last year, which happens to be correct.
Why would a news outlet do this? The top chart is flatly misleading. Is there anyone in the news media interested in doing a contrarian piece showing what's really happening with food prices? Why not?
Back in the days before 24/7 cable news and instant internet news no one would have the ability to get this out in the public domain. Maybe it’s a small paragraph on the 3rd page of the stock price listing in a newspaper. Maybe not.
The media needs content. So does Mr. Drum. So they will write any nonsense that get someone to pay for it.
Meanwhile… all this inflation is just politics.
“SAUDI CROWN PRINCE Mohammed bin Salman is enacting revenge on Democrats in general and President Joe Biden specifically for the party’s increasingly standoffish attitude toward the kingdom — by driving up energy prices and fueling global inflation.”
😂 someone should kill that SOB. Drone strikes! What good is this superpower military if they don’t kill off the real threats? Nuke KSA.
https://theintercept.com/2021/11/11/inflation-saudi-arabia-biden-mbs-oil/
And this is fun. Let’s break up the US. Please!!!!
https://www.mediaite.com/podcasts/david-french-on-evangelical-politics-and-the-threat-of-american-secession-were-beginning-to-reach-a-point-of-loathing/
On the possibility of secession in the United States
“I think it’s possible. I mean, it’s certainly not probable, but I think it’s possible. And if present trends continue, it may move from possible to probable at some point in the indefinite future. And the reason is pretty simple: it isn’t the ideological divide. That isn’t, at the root of it, what I believe is ripping us to shreds, it’s the negative partisanship. It’s the animosity divide. In other words, the mutual loathing that is arising within the United States of America. There is a way in which our social compact depends on at least a basic level of regard for each other. If our social compact says that if you and I are on diametrically opposed places in the political spectrum, but we enjoy the exact same free speech rights, kind of in a human way, I have to have at least some basic level of respect for you to want to extend myself to protect your liberty. And what’s beginning to happen is we’re beginning to reach a point of loathing, of mutual animosity that’s so great that not only do I not have any interest in your liberty, I’ve become an actual opponent of your liberty. And that’s when you begin to break the social compact.“
People are more motivated by annoyance than by OK-ness.
The chart might be misleading, but I’d bet that those are the most popular, and therefore most conspicuous, items that Americans purchase. Basically meat and dairy. We aren’t the fattest country in the world by accident.
And sugar, forgot that one. Meat, eggs, milk, and sugar. The four basic food groups.
Rather incomprehensibly, ice cream hasn’t increased in price, though.
The media, radio, newspapers, TV are in survival mode. Newspapers having the worst of it.
Everyone is in "If It Bleeds, It Leads" mode."
From their perspective it is war and in war the first casualty is truth.
Sweet Jesus Kevin
2 out of the 9 red items are related to animals Coffee and Sugar are not
We all know what happened last year.
Trump shut the economy down and all of the sudden meat packing plants were closing - people panic bought everything they could afford and everyone just stopped producing product. You slaughter animals at a prime weight. That stopped people from "growing" animal stocks and stopped people from breeding animal stocks - which in turn shut down the grain mills that supply the food to all those animal farms - so farmers stopped planting.
It's not rocket science. It's all timing
Farmers are planning their grain crops for next year. The animal breeders are trying to gauge how many to breed, top off farms are trying to assess how much feed they will need and how much help and the food processors are waiting to see if COVID rears its ugly head again
And that's all BEFORE it hits the grocers shelves.
Yes there is food inflation - yes its only temporary.
Good grief
How many companies control meat packing?
Very few golack
And I am NOT taking their side here either, but when the economy froze they got in a world of trouble, and thee was NOTHING they could do about it,
THEIR supply chain is very specific and relies on everything working together perfectly. The problem is that at some point some live animal is going to get slaughtered, and there is a "prime time" to that, and once you are past that prime time that animal becomes worthless. and when they stopped growing them - even temporarily it threw our food supply into a real mess.
Corn production was 13.6 billion bushels in 2019, 14.1 in 2020, and 15.1 in 2021 …
Per: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_Subject/result.php?130E9384-C2B9-3D50-93A1-FA49C95A3DC7§or=CROPS&group=FIELD%20CROPS&comm=CORN
Still waiting on figures for 2021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/194696/us-total-pork-production-since-2000/ Puts US pork production in 2019 at 27.7 billion pounds and 28.3 billion in 2020.
Rick-
How much of the production of corn and pork is used domestically?
THAT is the key here.
Kevin, all those items in the chart are for lack of a better term, staples. Items almost everyone buys and can relate to.
Right, everyone can relate to the nearly stationary or falling prices of bread, butter, potatoes, cheese, and flour. Not to mention wine.
Another article Kevin will love: https://www.npr.org/2021/11/13/1055315389/inflation-president-biden-groceries-gas-food-energy-prices
Tangent, from food to medical: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/11/12/medicare-standard-part-b-premiums-for-2022-jump-by-14point5percent-.html
!!! Cookie prices drop !!! Putting cookies in the jar has gotten less expensive !!!
Now that's the real news!
OK but what I really want to know is: is cheddar cheese the only cheese that's 3% cheaper? What about my delicious goudas and jacks and feta and so forth?
I view this as liberals catching on to what conservatives have known for many years - the news media is fundamentally dishonest and broken. Truth and impartiality are thought of as weaknesses, not virtues, to reporters. The goal of reporting today is not to inform, but to inflame - push people's emotional buttons until they are enraged.
Fox, OAN, Newsmax, talk radio, and the right wing media perfected this style long ago. Left leaning media are increasingly adopting the same style, just with opposite politics.
I've found a tiny bit of common ground with the right in terms of viewing the media with a mix of contempt and disgust.
The media is broken precisely because the loudest voices in the underground were saying it was broken. Rush Limbaugh & Alex Jones were basically Johnny Rotten & Seth Putman to the mainstream media's Peter Frampton & Yes, but Rush & Alex were less socially redemptive.
The national news sources ultimately punked up there coverage to mimic the EIB Network & InfoWars, & all three have ended up punking the American people.
Okay, I know this is wrong and un-american. I read Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate in economics, and he's been harping on the almost certainly short term nature of the present, spotty "inflation." Last week, he compared it to the two years after WWII (which we have just celebrated once again on 11/11) where the economy switched back, painfully and wrenchingly, into "civilian mode." He noted that the government was so rattled that it pulled out all the stops against the "inflation", leading to a serious recession.
Anyway, the un-American part: When one staple goes up unacceptably, we just switch to something else or use less. Take beef -- please! Decades ago, we moved to chicken and turkey, both for health and price reasons. Have never looked back. Fruits & vegs are pretty stable, and that's mostly what folks ought to be eating, anyway. Flour is down? Hasn't everyone learned to bake during the endless pandemic? And the holiday cookie, cake, and pastry season is coming up! And spaghetti, is down, too: another potential part of a more healthy diet. With cheese! (there go any health benefits...)
I agree that it seems most of the loud whinging is coming from a click-hungry news media plus too many crybabies in the public. And any family that needs to buy 8 gallons of whole milk per day ought to be smart and arrange for a bulk contract, maybe with delivery included.
If said family were smart they wouldn’t have gotten into the position of needing 8 gallons of milk a day…
The infamous family on CNN got that way via adopting most of their large broad. I don't think I'd call them out for that.
Exactly: I don't think the CPI numbers reflect substitutions except every year or so when they recalibrate their basket of goods.
Are the substitutions “sustainable” in that there will always be some suitable substitute, or does one ultimately reach the end of a substitution chain?
Salamander - not to quibble
11/11 on the 11th hour was the end of WWI.
On the whole you are right, and Krugman is more right as well.
Just take a look at profit margins for those companies in the food industries, medical and pharma etc.
Some people and companies are getting extremely profitable, during this time of recessionary pressures, caused by a pandemic
Judging from the two charts, it looks like they took the top N items. Kevin complains that is cherry picking. Perhaps it is, but where other than here could Kevin’s more comprehensive chart be used? And so then which subset of that larger basket should the masses of at best minimally numerate journalists choose?
Top N may be cherry-picking but it will be at least consistent and repeatable.
And when those items no longer show price increases, they will be replaced by other items that show increases. Inflation is soaring! Look at the rising price of lumber. Eh, lumber is going back down? Look at the soaring price of eggs- or look at milk, for your average family with nine teenagers. Look at staples like bacon- we can ignore frivolous luxuries like soup or bread or cheese. Soon to come- the soaring price of flour- no need to mention holiday baking; when the price comes down, the media will, yes, cherry-pick something else.
Exactly. Top-n is the antithesis of repeatable; and it is guaranteed to overestimate the price indexes.
Again, I note that inflation is the decline in value of a currency, entailing a general rise in prices of "all" goods and services. (There will always be exceptions, prices that remain stable or decline due to idiosyncratic factors.) One swallow doesn't make a summer, and price increases on ten items don't necessarily signal inflation. It's why there are producer and consumer price indexes, based on a weighted average of price changes across a large number of purchased items.
I'm shocked! $5 a pound for coffee? Is that five pounds of Maxwell house in a can? Is that what Denny's pays wholesale? I usually get Peet's for about $18 a pound.
2.48 pound for Folgers classic roast at Sam's Club
51 ounces I think its $9.48(?)
You can't buy a single coffee at Dunkin for that price for a pound of coffee at Sams.
Well, I certainly enjoy a good article about semantics while I watch my grocery bill skyrocket as the months go by.
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