• AEA in the news
  • May 10, 2016

The inequality that matters most (hint: it's not income)

Dishwashers and microwaves on sale.

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Quartz covered a recent piece in the Journal of Economic Perspectives about measuring and interpreting different forms of inequality. In Consumption Inequality, authors Orazio Attanasio and Luigi Pistaferri note that consumption may be more relevant for measuring changes in economic well-being, as people mostly care about their standard of living, not income per se. They find that high-income Americans do enjoy higher-quality goods and leisure time than non-income Americans.