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May 15, 2002

Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Is It More Expensive, or Does It Just Cost
More Money?
by Michael F. Bryan

y grandmother used to say, all too
repeatedly, “I remember when a hamburger only cost a nickel!” There are two
ways to interpret what she was saying.
The first is that getting a hamburger
requires a greater sacrifice since they
now cost about a dollar. And I wouldn’t
be surprised if grandmother was reminiscing about an earlier, seemingly happier time. But as an economist, I understand that grandmother might have
intended to say nothing at all about the
value of a hamburger, only that the value
of money had changed. Indeed, she
might very well have understood that
hamburgers are easier to come by at a
dollar than when they “only” cost a
nickel. It is just that nickels are even easier to come by!

But it is useful to appreciate the distinction between these two ideas. The causes
of inflation and a rising cost of living are
fundamentally different, as are their
remedies. Furthermore, keeping the
difference in mind helps one see how
price statistics such as the consumer
price index (CPI) combine cost-of-living
changes (which the central bank cannot
control) with inflation (which the central
bank can control). In other words, if the
central bank’s objective is to eliminate
inflation, it might not always find measures like the CPI the most useful
statistics for monitoring inflation—
especially in the short run.

Here we see illustrated the distinction
between two economic concepts. A rise
in the cost of living means that one’s
ability to maintain a certain level of
well-being has diminished. Prices may
or may not have risen, but people’s
income relative to prices has fallen. The
other concept, inflation, refers to the
deterioration in the purchasing power of
money—a rise in prices that comes
when the central bank has created too
much money, leaving people’s income
relative to prices unchanged. Inflation
does not mean it is more difficult to
maintain a particular lifestyle, only that
its cost in terms of money is “inflated.”1

The boss wants to move you to New
York City from Cleveland, Ohio. As you
consider the move, you will no doubt
reflect on the fact that New York is an
expensive place to live. To buy in New
York the same things you buy in Cleveland, you’d better be prepared to pay
considerably more for them. In fact,
according to recent estimates by the
American Chamber of Commerce
Research Association, it costs approximately 31 percent more to live in New
York City than in Cleveland. So unless
the boss agrees to a 31 percent “cost-ofliving” adjustment to your income, you
will find it more difficult to maintain
your current lifestyle in the more expensive New York marketplace.

This Commentary discusses the definition and measurement of the cost of
living and inflation—concepts that are
distinct, but are commonly talked about
as if they were the same. When one
hears about a rise in the “cost of living,”
it is impossible to know whether the
term refers to a change in only the
money cost of life, or to the difficulty in
maintaining a certain level of welfare.
ISSN 0428-1276

■

The Cost of Living versus
Inflation: A Descriptive
Example

Just as one’s cost of living may vary
from one place to another, the cost of
living can vary across time. Many events
can reduce our well-being, which is to
say, cause our cost of living to rise.
Droughts make food more precious, oil
shortages make it harder to stay warm,

Most of us, from the general public to
professional economists, use the term
inflation pretty loosely. It’s increasingly applied to any rise in prices,
and even economists use it interchangeably with a rise in the cost of
living. This Commentary explains
what inflation is, why it should be
kept distinct from a rise in the cost
of living, and how some statistical
measures attempt to distinguish
between the two.
and import taxes can make acquiring
foreign goods more difficult. These are
all real changes in our economic situation and are reflected in higher costs to
us. So, too, many events improve our
well-being—cause the cost of living
to fall—including new technologies
that improve crop yields or the fuelefficiency of furnaces, or medical breakthroughs that enhance life in ways that
previously were not possible at any cost.
Consider figure 1, which shows the cost
of buying the same bundle of goods (or
market basket) for every year between
1960 and today. Again, there are two
ways to think about how the cost of
acquiring this basket has changed over
time. In terms of dollars, the basket continually gets more costly. Specifically,
what cost $6,000 in 1960 would cost
roughly $36,000 today—a sixfold
increase. But does that mean it is six
times more difficult to buy things today
compared with 1960? Of course not. It
only costs six times as many “dollars.”
The sacrifice required to buy this bundle
of goods has not increased. In fact, it has
fallen, and substantially so. One way to
see this is by answering the following
question: “How many hours would you

FIGURE 1 COST OF A 1960 BASKET OF GOODS AND SERVICES,
MONEY PRICE AND HOURS WORKED
Dollars (in thousands)
40

Hours worked
3,000

2,500

30
2,000

1,500

20
15

1,000

10
500

5
0

0
1960

1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

SOURCE: Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

need to work to buy the basket of
goods?” In 1960, this $6,000 market
basket would have cost you about 2,800
hours of work. In 2000, it would have
cost 1,700, or 39 percent fewer, hours
(figured using average hourly compensation, which was only about $2 in 1960
but is approximately $19.50 today).
What accounts for the fact that the cost
of this market basket in terms of dollars
is continually rising even though it is
easier to acquire? The answer, simply
enough, is that dollars are getting easier
to come by because the central bank is
creating more of them relative to the
amount of things there are to buy. This
is inflation.

■

It is hard to imagine that anything other
than a continual increase in the quantity
of money relative to the number of
things there are to buy could cause all
prices to persistently rise. As long as the
central bank continues to create money
at a faster rate than the rate at which
additional goods and services are being
produced, prices will rise. But remember, this sort of rise does not mean that
the cost of living has changed. Indeed,
our incomes will increase right along
with prices, and unlike the price
increases caused by the energy shortage,
these increases do not reflect a direct
reduction in our well-being.

Definitions, Past and Present

In a 1997 Commentary, “On the Origins
and Evolution of the Word Inflation,” I
argued that the term “inflation” originally
appeared during the latter half of the
nineteenth century to describe a condition of money, not prices. An inflated
money was a paper money with a diminished claim to gold; because so much of
the paper had been printed in proportion
to the amount of gold it represented, the
purchasing power of the paper was actually much less than it appeared.
Today, our money is fiat (essentially
costless for the government to produce)
and not limited by our stock of gold. So
how does the issuer of money, the central bank, know when it has produced
too much money? The answer to this
question is relatively straightforward: If
the central bank oversupplies money,
the purchasing power of money falls, or
in other words, the money price of
things rises. That is, inflated money will

reveal itself when the prices of things in
terms of money rise. So the central bank
must monitor the behavior of prices as a
way of detecting inflation. But over time,
people have blurred the distinction
between how inflation is measured with
what inflation is. Indeed, today one often
hears the word “inflation” used when
what is meant is simply “price increase.”
Even in economics, the meaning of inflation can be perplexing. A survey of 34
college textbooks I found in the library
reveals that about half define inflation as
a “general rise in prices.” A general (or
aggregate, or overall) rise suggests that
to be “inflation” the price increases must
be broadly diffused across the market
basket. This characteristic distinguishes
inflation from merely any price increase.
But the other half of the textbooks define
inflation as a “sustained” (or “continual”) rise in the general price level. By
adding persistence to the phenomenon,
these definitions imply that a process
underlies the upward movement in
prices. While the nature of that process is
usually left unsaid, it certainly hints at a
monetary origin.
Consider an energy shortage that causes
gasoline and heating bills to rise and
national output to shrink as firms scale
back production. Clearly, this general
rise in prices reflects an increase in the
cost of living. After all, our lives have
become more difficult. As we now must
pay more for energy, we can afford fewer
of the other things we used to buy. Note
also that the drop in available energy
does not cause continual rises in the average level of prices. Once prices rise to
their new, higher level, the process stops.

Only a handful of college economics
textbooks make the monetary nature of
this process explicit by emphasizing
that inflation is something that occurs
only to the money price of goods. Paul
Heyne, in The Economic Way of
Thinking, however, goes to great length
to draw a distinction between cost-ofliving changes and inflation:
“Inflation is not a rise in the cost of living.
Inflation is basically a fall in the value or
purchasing power of money. Looking at it
another way, we can say that inflation is
a rise in the money price of goods. You
may even, if you wish, speak of inflation
as a rise in the money cost of living. But
the key word is money.”

■

The Measurement of the
Cost of Living and (Core)
Inflation

In theory, cost-of-living changes are
measured by envisioning the cost of
attaining a certain level of welfare and
comparing that cost in different places
or different periods of time. Unfortunately, “welfare” is impossible to quantify and a more practical approach is to
calculate the cost of a representative
market basket of goods and services and
compare that cost between two places
(like Cleveland and New York) or two
periods of time (like 1960 and today).
This is the basic idea behind the consumer price index, the dollar cost of a
fixed basket of goods and services
purchased by the average urban
consumer. Produced by the U.S.
Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor
Statistics, this popular statistic has
suffered some unfortunate criticism in
recent years, so much so that Congress
created a special advisory committee
to investigate the construction of the
index and make recommendations for
improving the measure.

TABLE 1 A COMPARISON OF CPI COST-OF-LIVING WEIGHTS TO
SELECTED CORE INFLATION MEASURE WEIGHTS
(AS OF JANUARY 2001)
CPI excluding
Variance
CPI
food and energy
weightsa
CPI components
(percent)
(percent)
(percent)
Food at home
8.5
0.0
2.6
Food away from home
6.2
0.0
36.3
Beverages
1.0
0.0
2.1
Shelter
31.5
40.3
20.3
Fuel and utilities
4.5
1.1
0.6
Furnishings/operations
4.8
6.6
8.5
Apparel
4.4
5.6
1.6
Transportation
17.1
18.6
0.7
Medical care
5.8
7.4
11.9
Recreation
6.0
7.7
8.4
Education/communication
5.8
7.4
6.0
Other goods and services
4.3
5.5
1.0

for example, has suggested that the core
inflation statistic assign weights to price
changes on the basis of their observed
historical persistence. (Mark Wynne
describes Dow’s technique in a working
paper—see the recommended readings.)
Goods that fluctuate widely from month
to month would be assigned lower
weights, and goods that show more
stable growth patterns would get higher
weights. This “variance-weighting”
approach means that no item in the
basket necessarily has a weight that
bears any relation to what one would
find in the typical household budget.4
Table 1 compares the market basket
weights used to construct the CPI, the
CPI excluding food and energy, and a
simple variance-weighting approach.

a. Variance weights are computed as the inverse of the individual (i) components’ time-series variance
relative to the sum of the inverse of component variances, or wi = (1/ σ i2 )/ ( ∑ 1/ σ i2 ) (computed over the Although measures of core inflation
vary by technique, most cast off the
January 1993 to December 2001 period).
SOURCES: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics; and Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. notion of cost of living (or any other

Many of the problems identified with
the CPI (and other similar market basket approaches) have been well known
to economists for nearly a century.
Most arise because the basket of goods
and services used to compute the costof-living statistic gradually becomes
dissimilar to the basket of goods and
services actually purchased by consumers. The lack of comparability
between the statistical market basket
and the true market basket creates a bias
between the measured statistic and the
actual cost increases being encountered
by households. This bias is an important statistical puzzle that makes the
market basket approach to measuring
the cost of living difficult. But another
problem is that market basket statistics
also pick up inflation because they
measure the money cost of the basket.
That is, the CPI can rise even if the cost
of living is constant if the Federal
Reserve continues to oversupply money
and makes the dollar an increasingly
inflated measure of cost.
Price statistics that attempt to isolate
the persistent rise in the general price
level are commonly called core (or
sometimes, underlying) inflation statistics. One gauge of core inflation is the
long-run growth trend in the cost of the
market basket. These time-series averages take the approach that we will see
the persistent component of aggregate
price movements only once it has
revealed itself to be persistent. But this

approach involves such long horizons
that inflation-minded central bankers
are left monitoring data of an economic
situation that is long past.2
An alternative procedure for measuring
core inflation is to reconstruct the market basket in a way that reduces the
influence of transitory price fluctuations
originating in various components of the
index. The idea here is that although
such price swings may reflect changes in
the cost of living, they are not part of a
persistent rise in the general price level
that comes from a monetary source. The
best-known core inflation statistic
excludes food and energy goods from
the consumer market basket, and virtually every major central bank in the
world uses some variation of this technique to turn a market basket price
statistic into an inflation measure.
This is a dramatic difference in measurement. By excluding some components
of the market basket, the measure no
longer reflects consumer spending patterns and therefore fails to qualify, in a
meaningful sense, as a cost-of-living
statistic; volatile or not, food and energy
are important to our cost of living.
More statistically sophisticated
approaches to the measurement of (core)
inflation, called “stochastic” index
numbers, weight price data purely on the
basis of “signal-to-noise” criteria,
disregarding completely the items’
importance to consumers.3 James Dow,

welfare conception of cost), in an effort
to identify the persistent part of the general price increase that the central bank
can influence, inflation.

■

Conclusion

A major problem caused by inflation is
that people are apt to confuse changes
in the dollar cost of things with changes
in the real cost of things. That is, they
are likely to confuse changes in the cost
of living with inflation. In this Commentary, I have stressed the difference
between these economic concepts
because they are often discussed as
though they are the same phenomenon.
They are not. The cost of living is a
welfare concept. It is intended to
describe how hard it is to achieve a certain level of well-being. Indeed, the
cost of living is a relevant economic
concept even in a world absent
money—a barter economy.
Inflation, however, is a nominal concept, arising only when the money cost
of things increases over time. Although
central banks have no ability to systematically influence the cost of living, they
can rid the world of inflation by carefully managing the money supply. How
well they do so, however, at least partially depends on how well they can see
the object they hope to keep in check.

■

Footnotes

1. Of course, inflation causes hardship
because it makes using money to carry
out market transactions more problematic and thereby lowers overall welfare.
I will not dwell on this complication.

2. In related work, Cogley (2002) computes what he calls an adaptive measure
of core inflation that averages past movements in the cost-of-living statistic such
that the largest weights are given to the
most recent data, which then geometrically decay as the vintage of the data
increases. In this way, the core inflation
measure is more timely than the cost of
living’s long-run growth trend.
3. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland produces a statistic called the
median CPI, an extreme variant of a
class of statistics called trimmed-mean
estimators. These statistics are similar to
the core inflation measures as they, too,
attempt to filter out high-variance movement in the individual price data. But
unlike other core inflation statistics, the
trimmed-mean estimators retain the
exact weighting structure of the CPI and
therefore gauge the cost change of the
same basket of goods tracked by the
CPI. In this way, the trimmed-mean estimators are more akin, statistically speaking, to the cost-of-living measure.

Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
Research Department
P.O. Box 6387
Cleveland, OH 44101
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Material may be reprinted if the source is
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material to the editor.

4. Similarly, Bryan and Cecchetti
(1993) weight price changes on the basis
of a statistical model that separates price
movements unique to individual items
from movements shared by all items in
the basket.

■

Full text of Economic Commentary (Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland) : Is It More Expensive, or Does It Just Cost More Money?, May 15, 2002

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