Subjective income-versus-price perceptions gauge felt economic pressure.

Evidence

In order to measure how households feel about how they have fared in terms of pressures on their lifestyle, we use the following question: ‘Relative to the prices for things you buy has your income increased in the past five years, remained constant, or decreased in the past five years’. This question captures the degree to which a household feels itself a winner or loser in the recent economic race. It offers a way to measure the pressures households feel on trying to preserve their lifestyles. — Neil Fligstein & Adam Goldstein, The Emergence of a Finance Culture in…, 73

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the financialization-of-everyday-life literature on felt insecurity versus objective positions; also to Kahneman’s objective-vs-subjective wellbeing work.
• QUESTION: Is relative-to-prices necessarily the same as feeling like a winner/loser, or does it conflate inflation perceptions with competition framing?