gold price might be a better gauge of real inflation...
Bingo.
And, if anything, the price differential in gold underestimates the true losses. The CPI index tries to paper over the real cost of inflation by using "hedonics". So, they don't calculate the cost of a display today versus the price of a display 20 years ago. Rather, they first multiply a modern display by 8 on the basis that the modern display has 8 times as many pixels as a display 20 years ago had. Thus, the "true price" of displays has gone down "exponentially", even in dollars (per their absurd calculations).
But this same argument, when reversed, shows that inflation is much,
much worse than even the gold price would indicate. The way to see this is to look at opportunity cost. OC is "all the things you could have done with your money, besides what you actually did with it". So, in 1920, the OC of buying a dress suit with an ounce of gold is all the other things you could have bought instead, such as a saddle or some furniture. But if you list all the things you could have bought instead of a dress suit in 1920, that list is
exponentially smaller than that same list in 2024 for the simple reason that we just have so many more products on the market. Thus, the OC of spending an ounce of gold on a dress suit in 2024 is
vastly higher than it was in 1920. This means that the money that the gold that is stolen from us today through inflation imposes
vastly higher real cost than the same theft did in 1920.
The promise of the American dream in 1920 is that, soon enough, every man would be his own king. And they had good reasons for feeling so optimistic... the economy was almost completely unregulated compared to today, and it was growing like a weed. That dream was secretly assassinated in 1913 and the corpse finally hit the earth in 1971. We are now just choking to death on the necrotic fumes of the rotting corpse of what was once the United States of America...
