Besides the index for the elderly, which Max mentioned, there is also
the index for wage & salary workers. "The" CPI which you read about is
for all urban workers. The difference between the two is a slightly
different weighting, and the two indices track each other very closely.
In order for an index for one group to differ from the overall index by
very much using current methods the consumption patterns of the two
groups would have to differ substantially, and the inflation rate on the
items with different weights would have to be much different.
It may be that the main difference for the poor is that certain
services, e.g., public transportation, are evaporating, thereby making
the auto a necessity. As more and more products become necessities for
cultural reasons the cost of living can rise substantially, but this
rise would never be shown in a price index. This is all cribbed from
Dean Baker of EPI who has done some of the groundwork.
Dave
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Sent: Sunday, October 26, 1997 10:45 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: price indexes
Does anyone know of any work on different price indexes for different
income classes in the U.S. A book I'm reading, Williamson & Lindert's
American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History, says that such price
indexes
tended to magnify changes in nominal income inequality, from the
mid-19th
century to the mid-20th. But the book was published in 1980, and their
data
stops around 1973 - so the book is sprinkled with assertions that the
post-WW II income revolution seemed to have stabilized, with no trend
back
towards 1920s levels of inequality. Has anything worthwhile been done
since
the early 1970s? Does the trend towards increasing inequality of the
last
25-30 years match the previous century's precedent?
Doug
