Abstract
Official income statistics suggest that the United States did not protect the economic interests of its poorest citizens very effectively during the 1970s and 1980s. According to the Census Bureau’s best published estimates, the average American family’s real annual pre-tax money income rose 12 percent during the 1970s and 11 percent during the 1980s. Among the poorest fifth of all families, in contrast, real income rose 6 percent during the 1970s and fell 4 percent during the 1980s.2 By 1989 the distribution of family income was more unequal than at any time since the Census Bureau began collecting such data in 1947.3
We are grateful to the Jerome Levy Economics Institute, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University for financial support, to Robert Mare and Christopher Winship for making available their extracts from the 1963–86 Current Population Survey, to Larry Radbill and John Sabelhaus for creating extracts from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, and to Gary McClelland for creating extracts from the decennial Census. Tony Maier, Karen Rolf, and David Rhodes provided invaluable programming assistance. Tim Veenstra provided research assistance and made the graphs. Rebecca Blank, Thesia Garner, Robert Haveman, Lawrence Katz, and Paul Ryscavage made unusually careful and helpful comments on earlier drafts.
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© 1993 Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and Edward N. Wolff
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Mayer, S.E., Jencks, C. (1993). Recent Trends in Economic Inequality in the United States: Income versus Expenditures versus Material Well-being. In: Papadimitriou, D.B., Wolff, E.N. (eds) Poverty and Prosperity in the USA in the Late Twentieth Century. Jerome Levy Economics Institute. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22953-6_5
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