The official cost of living was wrong for a century. Rent was the reason.

The official measure of rental prices in the US was too low for nearly a century. This means the overall cost of living, and therefore real incomes, were worse than reported.

For nearly a century, official US inflation numbers suggested that rent was getting cheaper. This paper shows rent was actually getting more expensive, just like everything else. Economists and historians now have a new baseline for understanding how much money Americans actually had.