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Grey Poupon And The Cultural Divide

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In recent decades, income inequality in the United States has been climbing. Scholars and pundits argue about what causes the trend and how problematic it is, but they largely agree that it has happened.

But has the rise in income inequality between rich and poor also been accompanied by a widening cultural distance between the two groups? A new working paper from Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica investigates the question. And its approach to answering it is amost as interesting as what it found. On today's show, we discuss it with Emir.

A link to the working paper is here.

And also check out this Vox piece that looks at the increasing references to Grey Poupon starting in the 1990s.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.
Cardiff Garcia is a co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money podcast, along with Stacey Vanek Smith. He joined NPR in November 2017.