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Grey Poupon And The Cultural Divide : Planet Money Income inequality in the U.S. has been climbing for a while. Has it also been accompanied by a widening cultural gap between rich and poor?

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Grey Poupon And The Cultural Divide

One recent example of a musician prominently mentioning a brand in a song: Kendrick Lamar with a jar of Grey Poupon in the music video for "Humble."
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One recent example of a musician prominently mentioning a brand in a song: Kendrick Lamar with a jar of Grey Poupon in the music video for "Humble."
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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.

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