The technology to manufacture insulin has been getting a lot cheaper since the late 1970s when bacteria were first used to synthesize insulin (before that it had to be extracted from animals). That process has become even easier since the process for growing E. coli has become much more efficient.
True, that was just one layman's brief pondering of an alternate metric, and I hadn't realized the secular technology trend. I was mainly looking for something that can't be debased because then people will die, but that is also has minimal volatility in demand, supply, and speculation, and requires numerous inputs so as to smooth out the effect of local shocks.
And perhaps I'm running into a Goodhart trap myself -- today, the problem seems to be inflation being hidden via product degradation, but if I pick a metric mainly optimized for that, it will get w...
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