Felt Inflation” and the Affective Politics of Economic Indicators: Governing Perceptions and Expectations around Prices

Inflation is not only an economic indicator but a felt number – one that resonates with daily necessities, experiences and expectations. Indicators like the consumer price index (CPI) anchor economic policy, yet their authority is often contested through appeals to felt experience. This paper examines how the notion of "felt inflation" operates as both a critique of official statistics and a tool for institutional authority.Trade unions, consumer associations, and civil society experts invoke "felt inflation" to criticise discrepancies between abstract indices and lived realities, arguing that official calculations fail to capture the "real" burden of rising prices, especially for vulnerable households. As a counter-metric charged with emotional resonance, it challenges the legitimacy of official figures. Statistical authorities, by contrast, often dismiss these claims as rooted in misunderstanding or "perception bias" – a concept that also appears in academic research – and argue for the necessity to "educate" the public on statistical rigour.The opposition in this dual interpretation of "felt inflation" reveals broader tensions and political stakes in the construction of ostensibly neutral indicators and the methodological choices behind them. It also highlights power relations in the affective regime in which numbers articulate with collective emotions like anxiety, frustration, and moral outrage. Notably, the authorities' response to the challenge posed by felt inflation has been to quantify perceptions themselves. For example, in France a monthly household economic outlook survey (CAMME) replaced the previous measurement of the "psychological cost of living indicator", developed in the post-war period. At the European level, the ECB has implemented since 2020 a survey to quantify "consumer expectations" and "perceptions" about inflation. In addition to regular polls, statistical institutes and central banks now promote interactive CPI calculators to personalize inflation estimates. These strategies aim not only to make perceptions legible, but also to ease public discontent in moments of declining trust in official statistics.This paper explores "felt inflation" as a site where affective politics and numerical governance intersect. Drawing from the sociology of quantification, we examine how feeling becomes a legitimate epistemic category in economic debates both through contestations against official numbers and through official efforts to quantify felt perceptions of inflation. We hence analyse how emotional narratives about inflation (e.g., distrust in "cold" statistics, moral outrage over "underestimated" price evolution) reshape the politics of measurement as institutions seek to reassert control by translating affect into new metrics. By tracing these dynamics, the paper illuminates a recursive relationship where feelings challenge the legitimacy of official numbers, only to be reabsorbed and governed through revised quantification regimes.