I’m a pretty smart guy, good econ degree from a good school, with lots of business and personal financial success.
Nonetheless, my college roommate is two or three times smarter, and pays even closer attention than I do. He went on to NorthWestern for his MBA. I believe he retired at 35 with >$20M, and plays the market quite successfully for his own account now. I’ll have him go take a look at Shadow Stats, and report back.
Stadowstats uses proprietary calcs but it's easy enough to reverse engineer the numbers. I can share the spreadsheet if you want, but it boils down to nothing more than headline-CPI with a fudge factor --which is why the exact numbers are kept under wraps. Anyone doing serious work in the marketplace has to use transparent functions of actual purchase prices.
Shadowstats's target audience are the political enthusiasts with little knowledge of economics.
Thanks