Inflation is hitting poor families harder than wealthy families, or so Christopher Wimer, Sophie Collyer, and Xavier Jaravel argue in a Groundwork Collaborative report published Tuesday that's getting a lot of media attention. According to the trio's research, since 2004, inflation has been about 0.44 percentage points higher per year for households in the bottom 20 percent of income than families in the top 20 percent of income. Wealthy people and poor people don't spend their money on the same items—a poor shopper might buy vegetable oil, while a wealthy shopper picks extra virgin olive oil—so the prices aren't necessarily changing at the same rate. According to their theory, companies have put more innovation into bringing down prices for wealthy families than for poor families.
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