This chapter got me thinking about the problem with governmentally collected statistics, specifically the “Official inflation rate” and how it is used for a wide variety of purposes.  We are told that in the past few years, the beast of inflation has been conquered by careful planning by our central bank, with inflation now around 3% a year.  CPI (Consumer Price Index) is used to determine pay raises, cost of living increases, etc., but I believe it is often a poor measure of the increases that consumers actually are feeling.  The cost of gasoline has increased more than 3% a year, and so has the cost of housing, but somehow during the years when these two key expenses were spiking up, the CPI seemed to keep falling.  This discrepancy between the experience of the population and the “official” rate are determined to suit the purposes of government.  The CPI is an abstraction of the true rate of inflation with some spin, but it seems that research with these politically tied numbers might suffer from problematic conclusions.