@Alon @SteveRoth Steve Roth is a wealth scholar. He'll probably speak for himself, but I suspect he'd argue in favor of holistic measures of income that include all changes in wealth (so, e.g., stock price changes whether realized or not would count) as determinants of consumption behavior. These would be missed by many Gini measures. 1/

@Alon @SteveRoth A more conventional frame would be "wealth effects": people do empirically consume more as they grow richer. I don't think it's very much studied, empirically, whether there's an analogous-to-conventional-income rich-poor difference in marginal propensity to consume out of changes in wealth. 2/

@Alon @SteveRoth But the meta point is this was an extraordinary period for all the reasons we know (and are told we must gnash our teeth over, though I think the 1970s were an economic success story, at least in the US), but one reason we don't so much know that Steve points to is that it coincided with a remarkable reversal in wealth concentration. That's worth thinking about at a lot of levels. /fin