How Far Does $1 From 1999 Go Today?
Visualizing American Inflation Across Eight Categories
Shri Khalpada
This interactive visualization explores how the value of the American dollar has changed from December 1999 to July 2023 across different categories. This visualization was developed using Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for U.S. City Averages from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Note that while CPI is the most widely recognized indicator for inflation, it doesn't capture the entirety of inflation. For example, the CPI does not directly measure the prices of investments like stocks or the purchase price of homes.
To provide a more in-depth understanding of the dataset, here's a summary from the BLS's documentation:
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of consumer goods and services.
BLS has classified all expenditure items into more than 200 categories, arranged into eight major groups (food and beverages, housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, education and communication, and other goods and services).
We hope you found this visualization interesting and appreciate all of your support for PerThirtySix! You can follow us on Twitter at @PerThirtySixers or author Shri Khalpada at @ShriKhalpada.
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