Spending of Middle-Income Families: Incomes and Expenditures of Salaried Workers in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1950

Most previous investigations of family expenditures have dealt either with families of wage earners or with all families without differentiation. This Heller Committee study centers on white-collar families in which the chief breadwinners were employed in salaried occupations with earnings between ＄4800 and ＄7500--a group about whose spending habits little has previously been known. The author analyzes the expenditures of 159 San Francisco Bay Area families. The reader will find not only the sums spent for each general category of expenditure but also the kinds of goods purchased; for example, information is included on ownership and rental of homes, purchase of new and second-hand automobiles, and types of household equipment purchased. Similar details will be found for each category of expenditure, and for the use of installment purchasing. In addition, non-consumption expenditures, mainly provisions for insurance and retirement, are set forth in considerable detail. The study also includes a comparison of the economic behavior of these middle-income families with that revealed in a 1950 Bureau of Labor Statistics Bay Area survey of families with lower incomes. This title is part of UC Press’s Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1957.

Emily H. Huntington was Professor Emerita of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.