Let them eat internet!
Households making $25,000-$35,000 a year spend ninety-two more minutes a week online than households making $100,000 or more a year in income, and differences vary monotonically over intermediate income levels.
That is from a new NBER paper by Boik, Greenstein, and Prince. Do note that the authors adjust for age and other demographic variables.
The upshot is that the real “undervalued” services from the internet come from its risk-sharing properties, not from the supposed lack of pricing of internet services. If something bad happens to you, well…there is always the internet to fall back upon, at least provided you still can afford the connection. This also means that business cycles are not quite as painful as before, but also that labor markets will be slower to adjust.
Some also may find in this fact an optimistic statement that “real life” (ha ha) has more to offer than the internet, with the caveat that real life is expensive.
The data in this very interesting paper also indicate that Chat has largely collapsed since 2008 as a way of spending time on the internet, internet time devoted to news sites has fallen from 10% to 5%, and social media and video are on the rise.