I blogged on a similar subjet a while back. I took an unscientific but diverse list of prices of 20 or so comparable items at the time I was in high school and today. Items like house prices, cigarettes, a meal at McDonalds, cost of the least expensive car, a gallon of gas, tube of Crest toothpaste, a bushel of crabs cooked and delivered from the same crab house we ordered from in 1970, a bus ride, a subway ride in NY, a slice of pizza, etc. The official inflation since then was about 5x. There can be no definitive answer to how the dollar-cost of living has changed because a lot of what we spend money on didn't exist back then, like computers and smart phones, but I couldn't find anything that increased in price as little as 5x. The very smallest price increase I found for any any item was about 7.5x (new economy cars). The sticker prices for every other item ranged up from there to about 40x (cigarettes and houses were at the high end.) 15x to 20x seemed about typical for most consumer expenses large and small. Therefore, IMO, the economists are understating it by about a factor of three or four. Oddly, since then I found one gross outlier: through-the-window air conditioners. I have no idea why, but they only seem to have approximately doubled in cost almost fifty years. I found a 1969 full-page ad in a major magazine for a GE at 120$. Any of several brands can be had at the big box store for a couple of hundred.