Inequality , Aspirations , and Social Comparisons ∗

Aspirations, Health and the Cost of Inequality*

How does inequality motivate people and at what cost? In a model of perpetual youth, people have heterogeneous upward-looking aspirations. They value their consumption relative to the conditional mean of those above them in the distribution; their survival depends on health capital produced from time investment and health goods. Higher fundamental inequality, working through the aspirations gap...

A Spirations And

This paper develops a theory of socially determined aspirations, and the interaction of those aspirations with growth and inequality. The interaction is bidirectional: economy-wide outcomes determine individual aspirations, which in turn determine investment incentives and social outcomes. Thus aspirations, income and the distribution of income evolve jointly. When capital stocks lie in some co...

Aspirations, Inequality, Investment and Mobility

What individuals want for themselves, or what parents want for their children, is conditioned by society in fundamental ways. One such pathway is via the creation of individual aspirations (for their own future, or for their children’s future). To some extent, such aspirations are drawn from past individual experience (as in the literature on habit formation or reference points), but at the sam...

Aspirations, education and inequality in England: insights from the Effective Provision of Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education

Money, happiness, and aspirations: An experimental study

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in the scientific study of happiness. Economists, in particular, find that happiness increases in income but decreases in income aspirations, and this work prompts examination of how aspirations form and adapt over time. This paper presents results from the first experimental study of how multiple factors—past payments, social comparisons, ...