The story of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is a common one that’s made authors like Thomas Piketty a household name.

But a new study suggests researchers may be looking at the wrong metric — and that inequality really isn’t widening much at all.

Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and James Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame argue that consumption, rather than income, should be examined. Using income to measure inequality is a problem for a few reasons. For one, it’s measured before tax, it’s not person weighted (a family with one person is measured the same as one with six people) and it may underrepresent the impact of government transfers. Income measures also don’t capture consumption out of financial wealth as well as durables such as housing and cars.

Consumption, they say, may be a better way to measure well being, since it better reflects disparities in access to credit or accumulation of assets. Consumption also is more closely associated with other measures of poverty than income is.

Meyer and Sullivan looked at income between 1963 and 2014, using the current population survey, and consumption between 1960 and 2014, using the consumer expenditure survey.

The short version is — there’s a much less stark gap between haves and have-nots measured this way. The researchers show that consumption inequality rose considerably less than income inequality over the past five decades. Between the early 1960s and 2014 income inequality grew by nearly 30% while inequality in consumption rose just 7%.

The study, circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research, has not been peer reviewed yet.