I don't know if this has been discussed here before but some economists have analyzed the effect of how people choose their spouses on income inequality in society at large.
I haven't read the whole study but here is my preliminary interpretation of the results:
Back in 1960s when women in the West were not as educated and professionally active as today, it was much more common for high-earning men to marry a woman from a lower social caste. The manager wedded the secretary, the doctor espoused the cleaning lady, the floorwalker in steel mill married the farmer's daughter from the countryside. Thus, women marrying up (and their families) could climb the social latter and men, intentionally or not, created more social equality in the grand scheme of things.
As women got better education and better jobs, however, to this day they have not been ready to do the same what men did for them some decades ago. Despite all the talk about fighting gender clichés, even the most ardent feminists who earn well as PR consultants or teachers are not willing to marry a plumber or a construction worker. Nor are they at least willing to marry a man who earns more than her but did not attend college.
Now, the social classes keep increasingly among themselves. White trash marries white trash. Academics marry academics. Effect: Income equality is much worse than it used to be.
Of course, the neoliberal capitalism, deindustrializiation and deregulation we've been facing since the 1970s/80s also are responsible for this mess. But the study provides another interesting angle to look at it.
Feminists are most often progressives, too. Despite their declared will to fight social inequality, a noble cause!, masses of liberal arts majors are not willing to live up to their theories in their private lives and acknowledge the decency of the average working class man.
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Changes in society in choosing a marriage partner contribute to income inequality across households. Professor Dr. Georgi Kocharkov, Junior Professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Konstanz, has established this fact together with researchers from the Universities of Pennsylvania (USA), Barcelona (Spain) and Mannheim (Germany) in the study "Marry your like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality" released by The National Bureau of Economic Research (U.S.A.).
The researchers analyzed the interaction of marriage partner choices and the distribution of income across households. Positive assortative mating, or in other words, the tendency of choosing a partner with the same level of education or income, has increased so significantly over the past five decades in the U.S., that it has a considerable effect on the income distribution. The results of the study will be published in the annual issue of "The American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings."
Analyzing hundreds of thousands of households from the U.S. Census, the researchers show that both the degree of assortative mating based on the education of husbands and wives, and the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality in a society, rose significantly from 1960 to 2005. Marrying a partner from another social class, which happened more often back in the 1960s, leads to a redistribution of income among households. Today, there are more married households with partners at the same income level, which leads to an increase in inequality.
"The results of our analysis show that if marital matching in the U.S. in 2005 was completely random instead of positively assortative as in the data, household income inequality would be dramatically lower," explains Georgi Kocharkov. One of the reasons for this development is the increased proportion of women in the labour market. "As women are better educated today, more women work, and less women have little or no income, resulting in more equality. However, with women working, married households have two earners instead of one. Thus the increased positive assortative mating pattern of marriages in the 2000s leads to a wider gap between households with two high-wage earners and households with two low-wage earners," says the economist.
The report is available at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w19829
I haven't read the whole study but here is my preliminary interpretation of the results:
Back in 1960s when women in the West were not as educated and professionally active as today, it was much more common for high-earning men to marry a woman from a lower social caste. The manager wedded the secretary, the doctor espoused the cleaning lady, the floorwalker in steel mill married the farmer's daughter from the countryside. Thus, women marrying up (and their families) could climb the social latter and men, intentionally or not, created more social equality in the grand scheme of things.
As women got better education and better jobs, however, to this day they have not been ready to do the same what men did for them some decades ago. Despite all the talk about fighting gender clichés, even the most ardent feminists who earn well as PR consultants or teachers are not willing to marry a plumber or a construction worker. Nor are they at least willing to marry a man who earns more than her but did not attend college.
Now, the social classes keep increasingly among themselves. White trash marries white trash. Academics marry academics. Effect: Income equality is much worse than it used to be.
Of course, the neoliberal capitalism, deindustrializiation and deregulation we've been facing since the 1970s/80s also are responsible for this mess. But the study provides another interesting angle to look at it.
Feminists are most often progressives, too. Despite their declared will to fight social inequality, a noble cause!, masses of liberal arts majors are not willing to live up to their theories in their private lives and acknowledge the decency of the average working class man.
