The economy giveth and - you know the rest

According to a study for the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., as reported in the Christian Science Monitor for March 1, the "economic well-being" of American households and families is "a bit" less unequal than government numbers indicate. The study

takes account of the value of work in the home (such as child care, cleaning, shopping), government transfers (including welfare and disability payments), tax factors, income from wealth, employer contributions for health insurance, and actual rents or imputed rents for housing, some of it subsidized - as well as the paid work noted in government statistics.

Their goal is to measure how many goods and services members of a household can buy or otherwise obtain - not just their income.

The difference between these two numbers is substantial - nearly 30 percent. In 2000, for instance, median money income - the level at which as many households had less income as those with more income - stood at $42,000. But adding in the other factors to achieve "household economic well-being" raises the median to $68,529.

So does mean we're richer than we thought? Not really; it's just a different means of measurement. It in effect says that someone earning $42,000 a year lives as well as someone making $68,500 a year who pays out of pocket for housecleaning and the like, who pays the full cost of their health insurance, and so on.

There are, as there are with all models, some problems. For example, there are imputed costs for work in the home such as, again for example, child care. So if child care services raise their prices, by this model your "economic well-being" goes up along with them.

Still, the "good" news is that

Americans earning less than $50,000 in money income are a bit better off in terms of their being able to obtain goods and services than the government's income statistics indicate.

However -

[o]ne reason the income gap isn't even worse is that some members of households are working more hours to keep up with their bills. In many cases, both spouses work or one tackles two jobs.

The median annual hours of total work for households increased from 4,401 in 1989 to 4,727 hours in 2000, the equivalent of more than eight weeks of full-time work.

Running as fast as we can to stay in the same place.