The kinds of goods that richer and poorer households consumed differed more strongly in the past than today. Movements in the relative prices of luxury goods versus staples caused the real inequality to oscillate in ways missed by the usual historiography of (nominal) inequality. On both sides of the North Atlantic and in Australia, real inequality rose substantially less in 1800–1914 than the literature on nominal inequality has revealed. The reasons for this relate to the relative decline of food prices, rural–urban price gaps, and the delayed rise of luxury service prices, especially after 1850. Throughout these centuries, the North Americans enjoyed lower living costs than their counterparts in England.

过去，富人和穷人家庭消费的商品种类比今天差异更大。奢侈品与主要商品的相对价格变动导致实际的不平等以通常的（名义）不平等的历史记录所错过的方式振荡。在北大西洋两岸和澳大利亚，实际的不平等在1800-1914年间的增长大大少于有关名义上的不平等的文献所揭示的。其原因与食品价格的相对下降，城乡价格差距以及奢侈品服务价格的延迟上涨有关，尤其是在1850年之后。在过去的几个世纪中，北美人的生活成本低于英国的生活成本。