Research Catalog

Title

Consumer expenditures : new measures & old motives / Stanley Lebergott.

Author

Lebergott, Stanley.

Publication

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, [1996], ©1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xii, 286 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• 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.

Subject

• Consumption (Economics) > United States > History > 20th century

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Ch. 1. Measures of Well-Being: Income versus Consumption -- Ch. 2. Was the Great Depression Driven by Consumption? -- Ch. 3. Did Underconsumption End the Boom of the 1920s? -- Ch. 4. Mass Consumption and "Americanization" -- Ch. 5. The Elite's Share of Consumption: U.S. versus USSR -- Ch. 6. Beyond the Consumption Function -- Ch. 7. Tastes - and Other Determinants of Consumption -- Ch. 8. Why State Consumption Patterns Differ -- Ch. 9. Estimating Procedures: U.S Consumption, 1900-1929 -- Ch. 10. State Consumption, 1900-1982: Estimating Procedures for Appendix B -- Ch. 11. Validity of Estimates -- App. A. U.S. Estimates -- App. B. State Estimates.

ISBN

0691043213 (alk. paper)

LCCN

95002852

OCLC

• 32349579
• ocm32349579

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries