CPI is kept artificially down by claiming that items that increase a lot in value are sudendly "higher quality" so that their price is adjusted down to equalize for "quality".
They will just take those items off the basket, put in different ones and claim that those are better quality so the actual price increase is in line with expectations.
I wish I could find the analysis now, but someone proved this out by comparing magazine prices to CPI's calculation of magazine prices.
I believe they uses Time as the example because the covers are archived and have the price printed right on them.
They went back a few decades and the inflation difference was quite large. I want to say the real sticker price change was multiple times higher than CPI's claim of magazine prices, but I can't remember the exact numbers.
there are frequent claims by semi-crackpots that the hedonic adjustment of inflation calculation is hiding a lot of inflation.
there was the famous shadowstats site, but it seems it shut down, or at least stopped publishing new stuff in 2023 publicly. (probably reverting to a good old affinity scam [5])
(fun trivia, noticed by a reddit user 11 years ago, that even though the guy claimed high inflation but the subscription fee remained the same over 10 years, and in the last post it was also "six months at $89.00".) and there are many posts [3][4] explaining why these alternate measures are very unlikely to be more correct than either the BLS' CPI or the BEA's PCE.
...
the BLS does a lot of work to have useful numbers for a lot of goods and services [0], down to computer parts [1]
and there are a lot of things that usually are now more fancy (and more expensive, of course), but don't have value adjustment in the list. (Matt Yglesias writes about the spa-ification of services, everything is nicer, fancier, from movie theater seats to barber shops, yet there's no adjustment for "haircuts and other personal care services"[2])
This is oft repeated nonsense you can disprove yourself. Make a reasonable basket of goods, write down current prices. Look up ads for those goods over time, write down prices. Compute inflation. Check BLS inflation. If there were even a tiny error “artificially down” it shows up as exponentially (in the literal mathematical sense) divergent values.
Your claim is false.
Also there is/was many other groups computing inflation such as MITs Billion Prices Project, lots of hedge funds, etc., and none have found much if any discrepancy between official BLS numbers and other methodologies.
CPI is personal (renting vs home ownership), very hard to have a good definition for (expenses tracked and weights), and more useful over short windows because the standard of living changes.
I can understand a certain amount of switching in the basket - e.g. a washing machine or dishwasher was once a "luxury good" in a market such as USA, but is now (for the most part) an everyone-appliance.
Interesting to consider the alternative case though, an "everyone basket item" becoming a "luxury good".
Democracy, maybe? But I don't think they've put that in the CPI basket - yet! :-P
It's more like, refrigerators are now way more expensive, but because they are also more comlonly equipped with led fixtures and have more style (no joking here, they somehow are measuring style as a metric) then it's all good and they have actually just increased around 2% with respect yo the base model (that cost like a third in dollars back in 1995)
FYI everyone can check the model used for hedonic adjustment for fridges
style is important, because stylish things are more in demand (that's why they are considered stylish), and the abstract property of style by definition is a "value quality" that doesn't affect the temperature keeping properties, whereas things like are there drawers or shelves does (as cold air is kept better by drawers - but of course they are less convenient)
that said, the style here seems to be simply a catch-all term for the organization of the inside, and the access methods (eg. doors).
They will just take those items off the basket, put in different ones and claim that those are better quality so the actual price increase is in line with expectations.