When our inflation infeelings don’t match the CPI

0:00This message comes from NPR sponsor Charles Schwab. Financial decisions can be tricky. Your biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash financial decoder. This is Planet Money from NPR. What drove the young man named Rocky to the Cinnamon Toast Crunch that day? His inner child, perhaps? Memories of Saturday mornings and cartoons in pajamas? Maybe, but there he was in the cereal aisle holding a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and losing his mind. Okay, y 'all, I might be an unk for real because since when is cereal$8 a box?

0:49What the hell? Rocky turned to TikTok to sort of work through his feelings about this apparent cereal inflation. Like, am I tripping? He's addressing a friend here. Gee, am I tripping? Has cereal always been this high? I guess. I don't know. Okay, he acting like it's normal. Maybe I'm just broken. Inflation has been and continues to be one of the single biggest economic concerns for Americans, according to a regular survey from Gallup. And that anxiety is very easy to understand. People are worried about the impact of tariffs. There are rumblings of possible inflation upticks to come. And maybe most obviously, prices are indeed way up compared to before the pandemic.

1:33Like groceries are 30 % more expensive than they were just like five or so years ago. And look, those prices are not going to come down. That is simply not how inflation works. We always have some inflation. Prices go up. The question is, at what rate do those prices go up? And two years ago, the rate of inflation did come way down. It's been decently close to the target inflation rate of 2 % for a couple years now. So inflation has cooled a lot, but you know what has not cooled off? TikToks like Rocky's, which I have come to love and call the, I'm sorry, groceries cost what now? social media post.

2:16The basic structure of one of these goes, Holy cow. I just got back from Target. Person goes to the grocery store. Went to Sam's Club for four items. Often buys 20 items or less. Two bags of groceries. Three items at a small town grocery store. These are notably not unusual items. Bananas. Some chips ahoy. Case of Diet Coke. Some peppers. Bag of pizza rolls. Just like basic things. But you know what? When they go to checkout, I'm sorry, these groceries cost what now? $20. These are five items. Six items,$88. Four items,$101. What the f***? The rate that we're going right now, next week, these four items will likely be$120.

3:00I'm serious, I'm not joking. Now, that would be 20 % inflation, and I very much understand this fear, because for the majority of Americans, we just lived through the highest period of inflation in our lives. And we're reminded of this every time we go to the grocery store. And we see what this period of inflation did to the price of our Diet Coke and our pizza rolls. And for our TikTok friend Rocky, his cinnamon toast crunch. Like, I'm almost positive that cereal was never almost$10 a box. It's true. I, too, have nearly crashed my buggy, specifically because the prices of cereal stunned me. I get this.

3:38And yet, it is my job to know the inflation data. And the official inflation statistics say that the price of groceries over the last year has increased 2.2 percent. Like, not ideal, but not the 20 percent inflation it may feel like we should expect. And I think there is something mysterious about the way we experience the mix of these dramatically higher prices and the not as dramatic inflation that we're in the middle of right now. We're not wrong. The data's not wrong. But maybe we can take a lesson from TikTok Rocky, who, when confronted with the proverbial$8 box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, had the instinct to just try and talk through those inflation feelings.

4:27Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone. And I'm Jeff Guo. Inflation. Feelings. In-feel-shin. In-feelings? Yeah, sure. Okay. Economists have been studying our in-feelings. Because when there is a mismatch between inflation and our perceptions of inflation, it matters. It changes our behavior. It affects who we vote for, what we buy, when we buy it, which mortgages we take out, all sorts of choices we make. And so today on the show, we talk to the economists who have studied us and hear what they've learned about why our sort of personal inflation calculators don't always match the professional ones.

5:07So grab a spoon and a bowl and some dang expensive cinnamon toast crunch and see if we can all work through some infealsions together.

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6:43That's grammarly.com slash podcast. There is a lot of good research on the ways our brains process changing prices. But before we started calling the economists names on those research papers, a more important phone call. Is this Rocky? Hey, yeah, what's up, Danny? Rocky Walker, 27 years old, security guard by day, TikTok creator by night, at Rocky Rare. Rocky tells us that on the fateful day of his$8 cereal video, he did not enter the grocery store intending to talk about Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It's been up forever since I've really sat down and just had a bowl of cereal and watched some cartoon.

7:25So you really were looking for that nostalgia bump? Literally, just, yeah, I haven't bought some Cinnamon Toast Crunch in a hot minute, but... Did you end up buying that Cinnamon Toast Crunch for$8, or...? Hell no, no. I'll put it back. Hell no. Rocky is not typically TikToking about economics, but if you are documenting your life these days, prices and money and economics, they're just all part of that. I mean, with everything, like, say, for instance, not even with just groceries. I feel like what my generation are, like Gen Z, like we're the new adults, quote unquote. What do you mean, quote unquote?

7:57Do you not feel like you're an adult? I mean, you know, we're all at her for the first time, really, just try to swim. But with these prices, it's so hard to try to budget between fun, between responsibilities and just necessity. And I feel like it's not a lot of weight on your shoulders because this stuff is not cheap at all. Yeah, because inflation is cumulative. It adds up. Overall prices are still about 25 % higher than they were five years ago. And these new higher prices aren't going away. Now, those prices are no longer going up at a wild pace. The rate of inflation has slowed way down by comparison.

8:36But our fears, our feelings that things will spiral out of control again, for some of us, for me personally, I'm not sure that has slowed down. We told Rocky that his TikTok had helped inspire us to talk through our inflation feelings with the economists who have been studying this stuff, writing papers about it. Along the way, would it be okay if I shared some of the things I've learned, like from the economists I've talked to and some of the papers that we've been reading? Would that be cool? Of course. I love getting informed, man. Okay, so we will check back in with Rocky from time to time.

9:09But that thing he said about his generation feeling this inflationary weight on their shoulders reminded us about some very specific research about how different generations react to price increases. Because living through inflation can leave a kind of economic scar that has a big impact on our in-feelings. To talk about that research, we turn to one of the authors, an economist who thinks of her own inflation anxieties as a kind of heritage. I'm German, and definitely the general anxiety of the Germans about inflation at all times has been transmitted to me, and I don't think I will ever get rid of it.

9:48Ulrike Malmendier is a finance and economics professor at UC Berkeley, and indeed from Germany, which had bonkers inflation in the 1920s. Wheelbarrows full of German marks, more valuable as bonfire kindling, that kind of stuff. So yes, she jokes that she has inherited disproportionate inflation anxiety. But her research has specifically looked at what happens when someone actually lives through periods of high inflation. The main emphasis of that research can be typically boiled down to saying, well, give me your birth year and get a very good idea of how optimistic or pessimistic you are about inflation.

10:29Yeah, depending on where you live. So let's say you lived in the United States during that huge double digit inflation of the 1970s and 80s. Ulrika found that this scars people. It makes them more likely to expect inflation in the future, no matter who they are. Even the best informed people who are, I don't know, serving on the Fed board, even these people we've been able to show tend to put a lot of weight on experiences they have had themselves. But what I was curious about were the more recent generations. Because, you know, for example, I'm 40. Our friend Rocky is 27. and neither of us has really seen or thought about inflation until the relatively brief spike around COVID.

11:15Yeah. So where you are going is also really interesting because you have had a very stable inflation experience much of your life. That was your world. You know, if you studied economics, you knew about inflation from textbooks. It was theory. It was totally theory for me. Exactly. That was just theory. And suddenly your world gets turned upside down. People in these younger generations grew up taking for granted that inflation was always low and stable. And then when inflation rates spiked in the early 2020s, it was extra disorienting. It really shocks you so much because you can't even handle that data.

11:56And that's what we are seeing in the kind of younger generation, your age, but particularly even younger. that's when, you know, you don't know how to move forward, where basically you keep trying to process it and you can't fully process it. So you do these cool TikTok videos about cinnamon crunch toast, which is, of course, a great cereal. Oh, Ulrika knows. I mean, she knows about cinnamon toast crunch being the greatest cereal of all time, but also why the price of cinnamon toast crunch might have a particularly outsized effect on our assessment of inflation. Yes. This brings us to the second major area of Ulrika's research that we want to talk about.

12:35And it has to do with the way that we as individuals perceive inflation versus the way economists measure inflation. So just to step back for a second, you may be familiar with the Consumer Price Index, CPI. This is like the main measure of inflation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the way this is calculated is they have this massive list of things that we pay for. They monitor the changes in those prices. And then they blend that all up into a single measurement, CPI, which tells us things are getting this much more expensive. That is inflation. It's meant to capture all of the price changes affecting everybody in the country in one single measurement.

13:14Now, what Ulrika has found is that we consumers are each doing a version of this for ourselves. But the list of items that we monitor, it is very small. It's really just the stuff that we look at and we buy all the time. Hence, all this emphasis on the gas pump, right? And then groceries. And we found, you know, people think a lot about bread, milk, eggs, men, also beer. Beer prices matter. Men, beer prices. Why not? Yeah. Each of us has our own version of frequently bought items that we really notice price changes in. TikTok Rocky, for example, really watching the prices of chips. Anywhere from the Lay's to the Doritos.

14:01Also, meat. Mind you, I don't even eat beef or pork anymore, but. But chicken, salmon, and watching most of all, eggs. Rocky loves breakfast, loves baking. Eggs definitely is one of the things that I'm going to have to buy no matter what. No matter what. And I do want to know your number one bake. Like someone's coming over your house for the first time, you want to impress them. That would involve eggs. I would definitely like, everyone loves mac and cheese. Like I would, I like to cook for my friends. So I would definitely make them some, um, some baked mac and cheese, like some soul food for sure.

14:30So Rocky may not realize it, but Ulrika's research would suggest that he is likely getting a big chunk of his take on inflation from the prices of chips and chicken and eggs because he is buying those things frequently. And all of us do a version of this. And Ulrika says that can mislead us. For starters, frequently bought grocery items, they don't actually make up that big of a chunk of our total spending. When you think about all the huge things that we also spend money on, like housing and childcare. Also, food prices happen to be some of the most notoriously unreliable prices to watch, which Rocky has noticed with regards to his beloved eggs.

15:16But yeah, like that's one thing that always kind of like gags me a little bit because sometimes it'll be like$2, which is like the normal price. And sometimes it'll go up all the way to like six or seven for like a dozen, which is crazy. Yeah. Food prices and gas prices, too. They jump all over the place, up and down for reasons that may not be signs of overall inflation. Because inflation, by definition, is a rise in prices all across the economy. As opposed to a situation where, say, bird flu messes up the egg supply or OPEC cuts oil production or a natural disaster devastates a corn crop. Those may just be temporary shocks in a specific sector that may go back to normal.

15:58And the irony of it all is that as a researcher and as a monetary policymaker, you are always pushed and asked not to look at exactly those items, energy and groceries, because they fluctuate so much. But we humans, that's basically all we look at all the time when you think about inflation. There is a different inflation calculation that you may have heard of that takes out volatile things like energy and food. It is called core CPI, core inflation. And it is something policymakers will look at to get a sense of overall inflation trends without the noisiness of those volatile price swings that we're talking about.

16:42And there's one final thing about volatile prices, which is that other research has shown that we really notice when prices swing up, but we don't notice as much when they swing down. People really seem to latch on to the up part and get totally upset about it. And then on the down part, they're like, whatever. You know, they're not kind of spending as much emotional capital on it. Well, Rocky is not going to make a TikTok when Cinnamon Toast Crunch is on sale for$5. I have to remember that anecdote going forward. Now, look, going to the grocery store, it's not going to be an anxiety-free activity anytime soon.

17:21Everything we buy really is more expensive than it used to be. And while the data show that the median income has generally kept up with that inflation, doesn't mean that everyone is benefiting from those increasing salaries. But it is also true that there might be, might be some additional stress we do not have to bring to those grocery store trips. Like the fact that we instinctively look at just a few grocery items to gauge all of inflation, and the fact that we latch on to the volatile ups of price swings but not the volatile downs, it does create a situation where we may be stressing over sudden grocery price jumps a little bit more than we have to.

18:02So what are we grocery shoppers supposed to do about these volatile prices playing tricks on our minds? Well, we asked Ulrika, and she says it sort of boils down to, could you find ways to blunt the ups and downs of those groceries, that volatility that isn't actually inflation? So if I could convince grocery shops to kind of average out prices, so take out some of these fluctuations, or I could convince you not to look at the price. Yeah, it's like the classic advice you hear about the stock market, right? Don't look at the ups and downs of your retirement account every single day. Just look once a year at the end of the year and focus on the general trend.

18:43You could possibly try the same thing with your groceries, I suppose. Like, just buy what's on your list and don't look at how the prices are jumping up and down and up and down. And then at the end of the year, we look back and say, okay, on average, wasn't so bad. So I don't like to get all nervous about. So if I could do that, I would love that. You know, that's an idea. In theory, that would make sense. Yes, I guess. And we did run that idea past Rocky. What do you think about that idea? Just close your eyes and buy the things.

19:18Um, I mean, I don't know. I guess I can understand the setup. It's just, I don't know if that would work for me. Yes, I do know. With everything going on, you kind of have to go into things like grocery shopping with a game plan. Because say, for instance, if it's some things that you know might go on sale later, you might hold off on that or make that stretch a little bit until you know you can get it at a decent price. So I don't think that would work for me. Yeah, it's not going to work for Rocky. Or probably most of us. It is very difficult to ignore the prices that we see all the time. But we can remember Ulrika's research, that we may be putting too much emphasis on too few things, or on things that change in price all the time and may not be an indication that overall inflation is actually on the rise again.

20:13After the break, we look at maybe the single most important thing we measure for inflation and why those measures, too, are sometimes hard to believe.

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21:48Visit BetterHelp.com slash NPR for 10 % off your first month. $8 Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Obviously, my favorite TikTok by Rocky Walker. A close second, though, is this. Picture this. Rocky is sitting in his apartment, which is maybe seven stories up in his Chicago apartment building. And some just told me to turn around and look out the balcony. And look what I see. The camera flips around and we see snow on the balcony. We see a couple bikes on the balcony. But also perched there on the railing. Hello there. What's up, buddy? It is the floofiest little bird you will ever see. It kind of looked like a baby hawk or eagle.

22:34It's so fluffy, though. Oh, my God. I will try to give it some food, but I feel like if I open the door, it's going to fly away. But, I mean, you free to chill there as long as you want, buddy. I would watch that channel 24-7. That's all I'm saying. But, but, relevant to this episode is that when I talked to Rocky, he told me he was currently looking to move out of that bird balcony apartment. And he's been very surprised at the prices he is seeing to rent apartments. Rent is crazy. I haven't moved in five years. And the difference between prices when I moved five years ago and now is insane. Yes, the price of rent.

23:16It is arguably, arguably more noteworthy than the price of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Like a one bedroom, one bathroom here in Chicago, you could very much find something within like the thousand range. And now we're like, they're very much asking for a good fifteen hundred or above to be in a decent neighborhood with decent appliances and something that doesn't look ancient. And I feel like that's crazy. The average price of rent is about 29 percent higher today than before the pandemic. And how much we pay to live where we live is one of the single biggest things that goes into the consumer price index.

23:53It's like a third of the total weight. The term you'll hear for this is housing services. And that housing services bucket in particular is an area that produces a lot of in feelings and also produces some pretty interesting conundrums for economists when they are trying to measure inflation. Test one, two. We brought economist Louise Shainer into the studio to talk about all of this. Have you had any dreams of mic checks you've ever wanted to do? No, I'm sorry. Mic check one, two, three. Brookings in the house. Brookings in the house. See, that one's good. That's good, yeah. Louise is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

24:28She's done a lot of work around housing prices and how those prices are factored into inflation data. We asked Louise to get extra nerdy with us and explain how the numbers are collected and calculated. And Louise said, A, of course she would do that for us. And then B, that we should start perhaps with how we get the cost of housing for renters like Rocky. It's pretty simple. It's your rent, right? How much are you spending? You're spending rent. What happened to rents? Very simple. No real issue there. That's pretty easy to measure. You could call me and ask me what my rent is. Exactly. Okay.

25:03All right. So that's easy. The data is easy to collect. More or less, you go around asking people what they pay in rent. And the people who track inflation for the Consumer Price Index, they're contacting all kinds of renters. People who just moved into a place. People who have lived in the same place for five years or 20 years or 40 years. And this is a very reasonable way to calculate overall rent prices for inflation. Because CPI is trying to measure the cost of rent for everybody. But the thing is, if you are like Rocky and looking for a new place, it doesn't matter what people are paying for rent if they've lived in the same place for 20 or 40 years and aren't moving.

25:45Like, those are not the kinds of rent prices that Rocky is going to find if he's looking for a new apartment on, let's say, Zillow. Yeah. And generally speaking, those live market rate rental prices for places that are available right now, they can change a lot faster. Yeah, way faster, man. It's really crazy. Definitely faster than what is reflected in the CPI. Yeah, so there can be this disconnect between what you might see for market rates on Zillow and then the measurements the Bureau of Labor Statistics, BLS, takes. And that disconnect created a whole thing during COVID, Louise says. Because rental indexes using big data like the Zillow Rent Index was showing much bigger increases than what BLS was showing on their rent index.