Psychologists (and renown happiness experts) Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky argue in a recent paper that our hedonic adaption occurs for two reasons.
The use of hedonic quality modeling in adjusting the prices of goods and services has destroyed the concept of the CPI as a measure of out-of-pocket expenses.
FORBES: CPI Inflation Rate Calculator (Experienced vs. Reported)
Psychologists investigating eudaimonic versus hedonic types of happiness over the past five to 10 years have looked at each type's unique effects on physical and psychological health.
The pleasure that comes with, say, a good meal, an entertaining movie or an important win for one's sports team a feeling called "hedonic well-being" tends to be short-term and fleeting.
Hedonic pricing breaks down a product into its key features say, the memory and speed of a computer and then assigns prices to those features rather than to the product as a whole.
By taking energy and food prices out of the index and applying hedonic adjustments i.e. altering benchmark prices based on perceived quality increases the government is masking its maneuvers, according to Lehmann.
Researchers at San Diego State University who conducted the analysis pointed to increasing cultural emphasis in the U.S. on materialism and status, which emphasize hedonic happiness, and decreasing attention to community and meaning in life, as possible explanations.
The CPI also ignores the direct cost of property taxes--sure to go up as states and cities bail out underfunded pension plans--and subtracts the "hedonic" effects of regulations that increase quality of life, such as the added expense of pollution-reducing gasoline additives.
How about the rate of GDP growth, the number of new housing starts, median household income, the producer price index and countless other economic indicators if they were reported without distortions caused by unstable concurrent seasonal adjustments, subjective hedonic deflators, chain-weighted substitutions, skewed sampling, delayed reporting, historical estimates in place of data gone unreported by failed companies, and other common bias factors?
FORBES: Distorted Government Statistics Endanger Our Economic Health
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