What do you think has seen the largest price increases over the past few decades: medical care, education or cell phone service? Find out using this interactive.

Hat tip to the team at Marginal Revolution U for sharing this resource.

The interactive begins with having you predict trends in the Consumer Price Index from 1998 to 2018. You make your prediction by dragging your cursor from left to right to create a trend line: 

Then you click submit and it compares your trend line with the actuals from that period. Once you click submit, your results appear as an Accuracy score and a comparison for how you performed vs. others: 

There are then 6 more rounds, where you guess the trend line for other goods and services, including education, medical services, cellphone service. 

Here's a table that you could use for this activity or just have students create their own: 

Questions: 

• Which good or service were you best at predicting (i.e., highest accuracy) ? Which good or service had the highest average level of accuracy from the population of people completing this activity? 
• Which good or service were you worst at predicting (i.e., lowest accuracy)? Which good or service had the lowest average level of accuracy from the population of people completing this activity? 
• How did you come up with your guesses/predictions? Did you get better in the later rounds? 
• Which good or service seemed to have experienced the most inflation (i.e. had the highest increase over this period)? 
• What do you think are the factors that determine the inflation trends for goods and services? Pick one of the goods/services in the interactive and try and explain the factors. 
• The Consumer Price Index measures the price changes for a basket of goods. Which of the goods/services rose faster than the CPI? rose less than the CPI? 

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Looking for other NGPF activities that have an inflation focus? Here's what the new and improved NGPF search tool found, including this FinCap Friday: Pay the Price.

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If you are one of the 8,000 NGPF Blog subscribers, then you clearly are someone who wants to stay up-to-date on all things personal finance related. That's why I thought you would be interested in NGPF's Back to School Conference this upcoming Saturday. Details here. 

About the Author

Tim Ranzetta

Tim's saving habits started at seven when a neighbor with a broken hip gave him a dog walking job. Her recovery, which took almost a year, resulted in Tim getting to know the bank tellers quite well (and accumulating a savings account balance of over $300!). His recent entrepreneurial adventures have included driving a shredding truck, analyzing executive compensation packages for Fortune 500 companies and helping families make better college financing decisions. After volunteering in 2010 to create and teach a personal finance program at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, Tim saw firsthand the impact of an engaging and activity-based curriculum, which inspired him to start a new non-profit, Next Gen Personal Finance.

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