Gas Price Relative to Median Income Has Fallen

Lynne Kiesling

OK, here’s the data to show that relative to median household income, gasoline prices have fallen:

gasinchist

Data used to create figure:

  • Median household income data for 1980-2000 from Table H-11 of Census historical statistics, in current dollars
  • Median household income data for 2001-2003 from Table H-8 of Census statistics from the Current Population Survey, in current dollars.
  • Average price of regular unleaded gasoline, 1980-2003, from Table 5.24 of the DOE Annual Energy Review 2004, in current dollars.

GINORMOUS ASSUMPTION MADE: The above graph assumes that the quantity of gasoline consumed per household has been constant over the past 25 years. This is a heroic assumption, but the BLS website was not sufficiently user-friendly to enable me to find data on household spending on gasoline in a useful form, and I desperately want to go downstairs and make that Manhattan!

3 thoughts on “Gas Price Relative to Median Income Has Fallen”

  1. The Not So High Gas Prices

    Much as been said recently about “record high” gas prices. Good thing it isn’t true.

    Lynne Kiesling (a senior lecturer on economics at Northwestern University) has several posts at Knowledge Problem demonstrating that, as a percentage of househo…

  2. The Fundamentals Are Basically the Same: A Reprise of Last August’s High Gas Price Posts

    Lynne Kiesling We leave on an intermountain West camping trip Saturday morning, so will be beyond the reach of communication technology for a fair chunk of the next week. But given that the underlying fundamentals have not changed substantially in…

  3. The Fundamentals Are Basically the Same: A Reprise of Last August’s High Gas Price Posts

    Lynne Kiesling We leave on an intermountain West camping trip Saturday morning, so will be beyond the reach of communication technology for a fair chunk of the next week. But given that the underlying fundamentals have not changed substantially in…

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