The problem with the CPI basket is, it needs to be constant of products to be comparable, so NO technological advancement is considered in that basket. Instead, they use the price of butter and tomatoes. Well, a fictious 1950s person wouldn't care that is can buy more butter or tomatoes than we can, but would want smartphone and a plane ticket to thailand.
The monetary reason is that the reason those things go down is because of technology advances and not because of changes in the value of the currency. Inflation should be about the currency, and less about what cool advances people are doing to make cheaper TVs and better websites
The practical reason is that if the basics like rent and food go up relative to wages, then a lot of people end up crushed by the basics alone and have no disposable income left for the cool stuff. The baskets are often too biased towards spending patterns of those who live the good life and for whom luxuries actually matter
Aside from technological and scientific progress in the medical field, it's generally been shown that people's lives have gotten worse.
The quality of the house your grandparents (for 1920 probably your grand-gran parents) is vastly different. Those houses cannot be compared at all, when I take my dump in the heated warmth in a nicely smelling place listening to some music over my airpods.
It's a statistical tool concerning populations, not a sampling of what hacker news user cicko in their wisdom thinks increases quality of life.
“If you would please look at the chart…” when it is known that inflation is a politically-charged figure that is indirectly manipulated to show much lower figures than the price increases the average person with average expenses (rent, car, fuel, food, etc.) experiences.
Let alone doing comparison of inflation over longer timespans. Garbage model in, garbage numbers out.
You can think of it with a thought experiment: A smartphone (with hypothetical internet) in 1920 would be worth almost all the money in the world. If you simply had one smartphone in 1920, the richest billionares would offer most of their wealth to have one. Hence in 1920, a smartphone would be worth at least $10M in todays money. Yet you can buy one for $500 today - so you are twenty-thousand times richer than 1920. The same applies for flatscreen TVs, antibiotics (really valueable when you need it), polio vacination etc.
You can't measure this with CPI, yet people complain about the CPI is fake. It is just a statistical average, no more no less. It always was irrelevant. It is the arguments people do with that number, that are bullshit. Basic statistics teach you never use an average to come to conclusions about the individual.
And that is the cause behind so much distrust in politics these days!
The problem is, sure, inflation as a whole using the official metrics may "only" be 3% YoY.
But WHAT THE FUCK does that have to do with the reality of the 99%, who see their grocery bill, their gas bill, their rents increasing far, far more than "official inflation" says?
The inflation basket includes way too much stuff people buy like, what, once every two decades like new kitchen appliances. It is of no use for me if that price stagnates.