Lebergott Consumer Expenditures

New Measures and Old Motives
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-6416-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

Reihe: Princeton Legacy Library

Changing consumer choices have built microchip factories where cotton fields used to be and have doomed cities from New Bedford to Detroit, while the impact of these choices on jobs and tax revenues has stimulated the creation of models of consumer behavior. Even finely tuned econometric models, however, have not served well as guides for policy choices, for they have relied chiefly on data for the Great Depression and the Cold War era or on biased budget surveys. Stanley Lebergott here provides the way to greater realism with new data for the entire twentieth century, including the decades of peacetime prosperity. The new measures also permit moving from the level of the nation to the state.

Analyzing our interest in individual economic well-being, Lebergott argues that consumer expenditure provides a better guide than the usual data on money income before tax. He also challenges continued reliance on a single consumption function in macro models. In other essays he uses the new data to demonstrate that the supposed "flawed prosperity" of the 1920s was not responsible for the Great Depression; points out the limitations of the usual consumer budget surveys; and contrasts the role of age, nativity, and other factors in creating interstate differences. The new data, which link to the official BEA estimates, will provide raw material to test and extend theories of how the consumer and the economy function.

Originally published in 1995.

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Autoren/Hrsg.

Lebergott, Stanley

Fachgebiete

• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftsgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Tables

Preface

Ch. 1 Measures of Well-Being: Income versus Consumption 3

Ch. 2 Was the Great Depression Driven by Consumption? 9

Ch. 3 Did Underconsumption End the Boom of the 1920s? 17

Ch. 4 Mass Consumption and "Americanization" 22

Ch. 5 The Elite's Share of Consumption: U.S. versus USSR 29

Ch. 6 Beyond the Consumption Function 39

Ch. 7 Tastes - and Other Determinants of Consumption 45

Ch. 8 Why State Consumption Patterns Differ 56

Ch. 9 Estimating Procedures: U.S Consumption, 1900-1929 71

Ch. 10 State Consumption, 1900-1982: Estimating Procedures for Appendix B 91

Ch. 11 Validity of Estimates 125

App. A. U.S. Estimates 147

App. B. State Estimates 187

Notes 249

Bibliography 277

Index 285