I'm looking for some reasonably authoritative graphs, charts or tables
(good enough to cite in a newspaper, say) showing the relative
proportion of household income (or household "effort") spent on
various "staples" like water, food, clothing, shelter and
entertainment across time and/or space.  For example, that in some
country fetching drinking water takes 30 minutes every day, or that
500 years ago in London, people spent 40% or their income on food, 30%
on housing, 5% on clothing and 25% on entertainment.

HI mjsx-ga,
You give examples of London 500 years ago and about time for fetching
water, suggesting 3rd world areas.
This expands the subject in time and space rather immensely.  Would
you be more interested in "reasonably authoritative graphs..."
relating to a closer defined time period and a preferred selection of
countries?

Fair question.  Does it help if I say I'm looking for 100+ datapoints
(not separate references!--the datapoints can be on the same graph,
etc.), that are related in time or space?  So it could be the relative
proportion of household income spent on water and food in London every
year for the last 500 years, or it could be the relative proportion of
household income spent on water and food in different countries
(preferably a selection of rich and poor countries) of the world in
the year 2005--I don't mind.  What I'm not interested in is isolated,
unrelated datapoints.