There's a simple reason for that: The price of a Big Mac is probably driven mostly by volatile inputs like food and energy. Food an energy are only a part of the overall inflation picture, and they're generally not leading indicators of long term trends. There are two key CPI numbers: headline and core. Core removes volatile components like food and energy because they tend not to be built into long-term inflation expectations. When headline and core diverge significantly, the divergence generally goes away in the near future, and it generally goes away when the headline number moves back toward the core number, not the other way around.

Long term, inflation is driven mostly by expectations and the interaction between expectations and wages. Spikes or drops in the price of oil or beef tend to revert to historical norms, so while they make for interesting charts in the news, they're not really all that useful for long-run predictions because they don't really provide steady enough "feedback" to feed into slower moving prices like wages. The divergence between the Big Mac index and our other inflation metrics is likely driven by that phenomenon rather than an actual failure of the broader metrics.

Anyway, it's not a matter of "assuming" the BLS knows best. You'll find that people who actually study this stuff and use the data think they put out a very useful set of indices and have very good reasons to ignore outliers like the Big Mac index. The BLS basket of goods is very broad, well analyzed and completely public. Every quarter we hear the big headline about something like, "Chicken prices spiraling out of control! Inflation to come!" Not unless the public at large *really* eats tons and tons of chicken and the trend continues for some time. There are other cross-checks that are pretty easy to do. For example, if the Big Mac Index was truly reflective of reality, we'd be seeing massive capital flight from the US to foreign markets with better inflation numbers. If you know the dollar is losing 10% in inflation every year, just sell your dollar-denominated assets, buy Japanese bonds with yen and enjoy your nearly risk free ~12% real return in dollars. Either the big money (who are presumably the puppet masters driving this whole scam) is too dumb to do this or that's really not how the numbers work out. Either that or all currencies everywhere are inflating at roughly the same rate without feeding back into wages anywhere, but that would be a really interesting macroeconomic state of affairs.

The intersection of "smart enough to be careful when planning your assassination" and "dumb / crazy enough to try assassinating a sitting US President" is probably very, very small. No doubt it's dwarfed by several orders of magnitude by the set "dumb enough to threaten to kill the President."

Comapring data points between two workers has all sort sof problems as you point out. But having all of the salary information public for everybody would lead to a much better estimate of the market price overall, which would be a good thing. Employers make arguments based on their individual quantization error and statistical outliers, but the real benefit is in the aggregate information. Knowing not just what your neighbor makes but whate everybody everywhere (including competing companies) makes allows you to make much better career decisions, the individual details about the guy in the next cube notwithstanding.

If we made that change, there would be a massive reshuffiling right off the bat, probably followed by a return to stability. If you have an individual case where you needed to make a weird lowball offer to somebody, they'd have the information needed to decide whether to take it up front. If you needed to pay more for a skill that was in demand on a short timeline, that would probably reflected in total market prices. Instead of having to pay your current people more to match the new employee's rate, you'd probably already have lost your employees who were making less than the market rate. Which is probably a good thing as well, because there's clearly plenty of high value work for them to be doing.

Take a look at the BLS data instead of sampling single data points. Like most people, your estimate of inflation is based on your gut and not on real data. Think about it this way: Assuming you're spot-on about soda and the price is climbing rapidly, what percentage of the average American household income goes to buying soda? How would even a small change in the price of some other good affect the usefulness of that data point?

But by the iPad Gen 1 index, inflation is way down. By the gold index, we're in deflation. By the California water index, inflation is out of control. But those aren't really indexes. They're just prices. The BLS puts a *ton* of effort into creating an index of what people actually buy that's comparable from year to year. A single price randomly sampled just won't do it. If you ask the average American, they seem to think they spend 95% of their income on gasoline and milk. But they don't. They spend a moderate percentage of their income on gas and hardly any of it on milk. They probably don't remember the 1/10th of a refrigerator they "bought" this year due to depreciation, for example.

The reality is that the BLS numbers match up well with the independent billion price index and with inflation expectations built into the financial markets. The odds that shadowstats or some other bogus index is the "real" index are slim to none. If we were really getting hammered at the the rates that, say, shadowstats, would have us believe, we'd all be destitute and we'd have noticed at least some captial flows following the money.

That's even better. Knowing what the guy in the next cube over makes just makes for a short-term rejiggering of the local salary distribution. Knowing with fairly high precision what you could be making literally anywhere else actually makes for good market rates. GlassDoor is a good start, but the market for employees would be much more efficient if all of that information was public and accurate. It would feel "icky" to us for a few months because of our culture and it would piss off corporate management (generally the benficiary of the current inefficiency), but the long run equilbiriubm would be better.

The grand problem isn't about a comparison between two employees and trying to justify why their salaries aren't identical. The real issue is that all of the salary information being public would actually result in good price setting information for everybody. Once we got over the initial shock that everybody doesn't make exactly the same amount of money, employees would actually be able to look at the aggregates and the data for other companies and make rational decisions about what they're really worth. As it stands, people are just guessing and a lot of suboptimal pricing is happening.

This is something that never made sense to me about the legal profession. If an engineer designed a bridge that violated building codes, he'd be in a world of shit. If a pilot ingored FAA regulations or safety best practices, that would be the end of his career. A lawyer can write a contract that's 80% unenforceable nonsense, sell that service to his employer as good legal work, and walk away with a paycheck and a blessing from his guild.

The non-union version would be a little different, though. Employers would have to pay their underpaid good performers more, and if budget started to get tight as salaries normalized, they'd have to get rid of the drooling idiot who wasn't earning his keep. In the union version, it's hard to get rid of the unproductive idiot for anything short of murder. In a competitive workplace, it's just a question of total salary budget.

That's a problem with management giving realistic assessments and comparisons to their employees, though. If you think you're above average and you're not, your manager should be able to give you a good reason why you're not. Ultimately after the initial shake up (even if it involves people moving to other companies where they'll *still* likely be rated as below average), people will settle into reality. The thought experiments people do about this stuff seems to conflict with real experiments. The NBA doesn't collapse into chaos because the news reports it whenever LeBron James gets a new contract. Other players know that they're making less than he is and they probably generally know why. It's just part of the culture, and the equilbrium dosn't seem to be any differnt from a workplace where salaries are kept a closely guarded secret. It would just take time for our culture to shift.

It doesn't "have" to be perfect to be a working market. It just has to be perfect in order to be a completely idealized perfectly competitive free market on paper. No markets live up to the perfectly idealized theory, but they generally work. They just work less well as you move away from that ideal state. "I don't know what my competitor whill charge tomorrow" is a slight deviation from perfect information, but it's not really a big deal. "Nobody knows what anybody else is charging," is a major deviation that causes real problems.

It's a problem that applies really well to the medical market as well: You don't know nearly as well as your doctor what the actual value of his services are. You also often don't know what he'll charge you until after you've "bought" his services. And you sure as hell don't have a list of what other doctors would charge you. The end result is that the market is a total mess. Every step away from that problem and toward more perfect information (clearly published prices, more educated consumers, etc.) will improve outcomes, even if we never get to true "perfect information."

That could be read one of two ways:

1) Different students might need to be taught in different ways to learn the same set of skills.
2) Different students should come out of school with very different sets of skills.

I'm totally onboard with (1), but not so much with (2). "He can't add, but boy can he write!" Everybody is going to have natural aptitudes for certain things, but there's a basic level of core competence that everybody should be able to hit.

Since non-GMO foods have been consumed over many lifetimes of consumption, their safety or lack thereof has been pretty well established.

We're constantly hybridizing and producing all manner of crazy new plants where God knows how many genes are combined in totally new ways. There are tons of hybrids we're eating right now that have nowhere near "many lifetimes" worth of consumption, and there's no good reason to think that we'll do a better job of predicting all of their subtle properties (especially "long term" safety) any better than if we take a known organism and add one carefully selected gene to it.

I'm in favor of good information on food labels, but I also see the complaint from the GMO producers. I think they're worried about something like this:

GMO company: There's no need to label these things. They're perfectly safe.
Anti-GMO activist: Why do you hate transparency? If it's perfectly safe, there's no reason not to label them.

[Time passes. Labels mandated.]

Anti-GMO activist: If GMOs are so safe, why is labeling them mandatory?
Consumers: Hey! That's a good point!

Same here. We think and solve problems similarly, so there isn't much "talking past each other" when we disagree. If a problem can be reasoned through, we usually come to agreement. If it's squishier, we both sort of recognize that it's probably not worth fighting to the death over. Money and worry about unemployment is never a problem, so we don't fight over it or nitpick how it's spent (in fact, we each have a mix of private and shared accounts after 10 years of marriage, and we each handle a subset of the household financees without much oversight from the other). Beyond that I suppose everything else is pretty normal, but those are two big issues that cause a lot of relationship trouble that work out to a pretty strong built-in advantage for us.

We're both pretty mellow people who don't usually get wound up about stuff that's not really important, but I'm not sure if that's just who we are or if it's associated with how we were educated and how we work. There seem to be certain types of people who genuinely get bored and need a certain amount of drama in their human interactions and will create it if it's not there. Those people seem to be less common in engineering, although I don't have a lot to quantify or support that. Those people are usually not fun to be around and seem like they'd be a nightmare to be married to.