ABSTRACT
The objective of the Beebout/Peabody/Doyle paper entitled “The Distribution of Household Energy Expenditures and the Impact of High Prices” is, as the authors state, “to provide descriptive data to better inform the policy debate.” There is no doubt that the need for data has been great and the analysis conducted by the authors of a recent survey will be helpful in meeting that need. The empirical “facts” they demonstrate are very important, but the thrust of this paper will be to suggest that a little bit of conceptualization can go a long way toward giving the data a more meaningful form. The authors have the “facts,” but we need to know which facts are important and which facts are not so important. Taking the liberties of a discussant, I will reorganize and rework some of the basic ideas presented in the paper. The conceptualization I offer is a very simple representation of an idea that we all probably understand rather well, but it does lend a good deal of coherence to the data.
