State-level estimates of income shares for the top one and five percent of the population are presented for 1929, 1933, and 1939. Significant cross-sectional variation is found in 1929, but the range narrows as the shares fall dramatically to 1933. Analysis indicates that property incomes influence the shares but provides little evidence of a tradeoff between per capita income and inequality as measured by the shares.

This paper applies a feminist analysis to the measurement of living standards during the 1970s. It suggests that widely made assumptions of homogeneous pooling and redistribution of income, labor, and expenditures within families mask inequalities and uneven changes in the living standards of wage-working husbands and wives. Two waves of the Panel Study of Income dynamics are used to create two rough indicators, that is, reproduction pay and surplus, to test for inequalities and uneven changes in 1968 and again in 1979. In general, the findings show differential living standards between husbands and wives when assumptions of homogeneous pooling and redistribution are not made. The paper concludes that the suggested rough indicators are useful for the measurement of living standards.

It is obvious that the path taken by Europe and North America is not to be a universal one. If the rest of the world can never live as we have lived in the past half-century and cannot have our material level of living, what goals and direction of change can be found that will offer an acceptable future? The People's Republic of the Congo offers an interesting backgound from which to address this process of reformulation.

The effect of the commercialization of traditional agriculture on the levels of living of peasant households is examined through a case study of El Palmar, Colombia. While there appear to have been widespread, positive, short-mn effects, the long-run consequences appear to be more problematic. It is suggested that commercialization and its consequences are more complex than can be grasped from available aggregate data, and a historical, case-study approach to this topic is recommended to complement macroeconomic studies.