Cell phones, consumer expenditure survey and pollster.

Here is a story with a lot of digressions. I was looking something up at the consumer expenditure survey today. To get side tracked the consumer expenditure survey is really great it interviews a bunch of households in the US and finds out how people spend their money. I was looking up how much the average person making $20,000-$30,000 spends on their rent (the answer 37%). This is useful information if you are doing a budget or renting someone a house to see how you or your renters stack up against the average person.

So back to the point at hand the CES has been tracking changes in spending on cell phones and land lines. By 2006 the average household spent the same on land lines as they cell phones. This probably isn’t the best data to show it but I think it confirms the trend that people are going from land line only to cell phone only, since spending on land lines is down 20% between 2001-2006 (I don’t think prices have fallen that much or at all in land line service).

This reminds me of a good article by Nate Silver over at 538. He was discussing the problem of political polls in that they do not call people on cell phones. When this is this case they need to find more people with land lines who are similar to those with those on the cell phone. In other words they likely need to call more young people on land lines to make up for all those missing a cell phone. It’s really a good article.