Income and Concern About Climate Change

Erik Voeten at The Monkey Cage comments on a new paper demonstrating the income elasticity of demand of public morals:

The authors argue that this supports the notion that environmental concerns are a luxury good, in the sense that these concerns seem to rise to the front when economic times are good and recede when times are bad. In political science and sociology we would call this a post-materialist concern. This characterization is quite old (although not entirely uncontroversial) but the use of internet search data is novel and interesting.