Put away that Rolex, because there's a new
conspicuous consumption totem on the block.
A June paper from
the National Bureau of Economic Research looking at, in part, common
predictors of wealth, found that owning an iPhone is a strong sign that someone
is in fact straight ballin'. Or, at least "high-income."
"We measure
cultural distance between two groups as the ability to infer an individual's
group based on his or her (i) media consumption, (ii) consumer behavior, (iii)
time use, or (iv) social attitudes," notes the study abstract.
The paper, by Marianne
Bertrand and Emir Kamenica, has some interesting details. For example, while in
1992 using Grey Poupon Dijon was 62.2% indicative of being high income, by 2016
that fanciest of mustards had been replaced by the iPhone.
Specifically, owning an
iPhone was 69.1% predictive of being high income.
"Knowing whether
someone owns an iPad in 2016 allows us to guess correctly whether the person is
in the top or bottom income quartile 69 percent of the time," wrote the
researchers. "Across all years in our data, no individual brand is as
predictive of being high-income as owning an Apple iPhone in 2016."
What a proclivity for
spreading Grey Poupon on an iPhone says about your wealth was not addressed by
the researchers.
And yeah, iPhones are
expensive. A 64 GB iPhone X costs $999. Does that, however, mean everyone who
owns an iPhone is rich? Definitely not. Even so, according to Bertrand and
Kamenica, it's a pretty good sign.
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