Consumer Expenditures: New Measures and Old Motives

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 pro...