The Toil Index

 If earning $75,000 a year is the key to happiness — unless, of course, you earn less than the median income in your profession — here’s another measure of well-being: whether you can afford to live in a good school district.In a paper presented at the American Economics Association convention in Denver, Robert H. Frank, professor of economics at Cornell University, talked about the deficiencies of assessing economic well-being simply by measuring the commonly accepted gross domestic product per capita.

Because of rising income inequality, he said, the number of hours that a worker earning the median wage would have to work in order to be able to rent a median-priced house grew dramatically between 1970 and 2000. That coincided with a sharp increase in income inequality. As Mr. Frank writes, “almost all significant income gains in the United States have been confined to the top quintile of the earnings distribution, and most of the income growth has been concentrated near the top of that group.”

As a result, because they have more money to spend — and disproportionately so — the rich have driven up the prices of housing in the most desirable neighborhoods with the best schools, forcing lower-income families to pay more to buy or rent homes in those communities.

Mr. Frank calculates that between 1970 and 2000, the median earner would have gone from working a little over 40 hours a month to afford a median-priced home to working close to 70 hours.

Although he did not include data for the last 10 years, Mr. Frank said in an interview that he suspected that figure would have risen through the boom years of the decade. Even if they may have fallen since the housing bust, they are most likely still above 2000 levels, he said.