How does 8% inflation correlate with the 30-50% increase in the price of products also accounting for shrinkflation?

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Edit: thanks to everyone especially those of you that have really detailed answers. I’ve learned a lot .

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Every one is talking about a basket of goods and averaging it, which is part of the answer.

But I think the more important part of this answer is that you are forgetting causation. Inflation is something we measure and imagine as an abstraction for the economy. Where as the price of goods are the actual real world values (that we measure from). Inflation is then defined (caused by) the movement in prices (buying power) against money. As the saying goes, “correlation is not causation” because many things are correlated that don’t actually effect each other; this compounds with the way verbs work in English. The point I am trying to make clear is that inflation *doesn’t correlate prices to it* (inflation doesn’t act on prices, prices act on it), price changes are the *cause of inflation* by definition.

As for shrinkflation, that’s more of a long term thing, often over years or decades. But that’s how inflation happens in other years, where a jar of peanut butter might stay 2.99 for 3 years, but because of inflation over those three years they remove an ounce of it at some point, which would be ~2% inflation relative to the value of peanut butter (if it was originally 16oz).

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