Snowblowers - Showing how the middle class is better off than 30 years ago
Monday December 17, 2007
We had a fairly major snowstorm this weekend (even by Canadian standards) and it seems that every second house in our neighbourhood has a snowblower.
This struck me as quite unusual. I remember growing up that it was fairly rare to see a household with a snowblower - only one or two houses on the block would have one. The ironic thing is, this area of the world received more snow in the the 1970s and early 1980s than it has in the last few years.
The neighboorhood I live in now is not that much different than the one I grew up in. But it is possible that the two neighboorhoods are not represenative or my memory is faulty.
When I go into work, I will have to get the Statistics Canada data on snowblower ownership per capita (I cannot seem to access the data from home). I did find this through a Google search:
This struck me as quite unusual. I remember growing up that it was fairly rare to see a household with a snowblower - only one or two houses on the block would have one. The ironic thing is, this area of the world received more snow in the the 1970s and early 1980s than it has in the last few years.
The neighboorhood I live in now is not that much different than the one I grew up in. But it is possible that the two neighboorhoods are not represenative or my memory is faulty.
When I go into work, I will have to get the Statistics Canada data on snowblower ownership per capita (I cannot seem to access the data from home). I did find this through a Google search:
Canadians spend a considerable amount of money on their household snowblowers. In 2003, more than 200,000 households purchased a snowblower, with half spending over $800.Can anyone access the snowblower data of CANSIM TABLE 203-0005 and let me know if my hypothesis is correct?
Just over 20% of households owned a gas-powered snowblower in 2006.
Comments
That seems to be the mainstream economic hardline to whenever a liberal points out that middle Americans’ wages aren’t keeping up with richer Americans’ wages. But, I think that misses the point. The point that many are making is not necessarily that absolute real wages are stagnant or falling, it is that relative real wages (relative to the rich) are bad - ie the gap is widening. Of course, economic models can’t handle relative preferences easily - but model after model in the psychological sciences shows us that we care about not just how well off we are, but how well of we are compared to the Jones’s next door.