The Marriages of Power Couples Reinforce Income Inequality

My two thoughts on this:

1. I bet a large portion of this phenomenon is related to the current US divorce laws (basically a woman with a child can divorce a high-income husband and claim a large portion of his income for child support / maintenance).

Therefore marrying people of your 'social circle' is a certain way to mitigate this effect (ie if your spouse is a high-level attorney rather than a secretary, you have a much lower risk of it happening to you).

2. Author kinda assumes the reader is an idiot in some places. For example: "As it becomes harder for many people to “marry up”.

Well, no. "People" never really married up. Women with looks had a chance to marry men of higher social standing. The reverse (man marrying a woman of higher social standing) was very much an exception.

So basically what this means is that men of today are not as interested in marrying women beneath their social status as they were in the past.

I guess that women's liberation had a lot to do with this phenomenon. If one is an intelligent woman, she can simply go to a good school and get a career - instead of her only choice in life being marriage to a rich man. So that actually sounds like a not terrible thing for such women.

Some of the comments in this thread make me think if people actually date anymore.

People interact with other people that are close to them at any given time, childhood, college, career.

Marrying your sweetheart became rarer since people stopped marrying at the age of 18 in general. Marrying your college GF became more rare because people are now marrying in their late 20's to mid 30's rather than early 20's. When people move on with their life they usually replace their previous social circles with new ones.

So if you are a banker your social circle will be made mostly from your new coworkers and maybe maybe 1 or 2 childhood/college friends if they happen to still live near by. So you are much more likely to marry another banker, lawyer, trader and the likes simply because those are the people you interact with on your day to day, and those are the people you'll be more likely to see after work at less than official capacity.

It's not like people actively look for spouses who make as much as they do, is that they more likely to meet a spouse from the same social economic circle. Life isn't some feel good romcom, yes sometimes some one might fall in love with a maid, a waiter, or meet their soul mate in the park when their dogs decides to run through the sprinklers who just happens to be a teacher but the likelihood of that happening by chance is about the same as a romcom winning the Oscars.

I won't claim that some people don't do some due diligence and plan engagements with every potential mate to the point where they cover financial compatibility but I would dare to say this is rare. Other arrangements such as prenups are also much more likely to happen in such cases where there is financial inequality to begin with or when one of the partners has hereditary assets which they would like to protect.

P.S. It's a bit odd that not subsidizing some one these days will count as income inequality, also it's important to point out that financial inequality between partners leads to infidelity and divorce. Partners who make less money than their other partner are much more likely to cheat, especially if they become a full time or part time stay at home parent. Marriages in which one of the partners makes significantly more than the other also are 3 times more likely to end up in divorce.

More on this phenomenon in "Coming Apart: The State of White America".

My 2c: A guy or gal making $350K is not commended for reducing income inequality by marrying someone making $60K. Indeed, if things fall apart, the "equity courts" will divide the earnings spouse nicely between them. While I can understand you don't want someone on the street, these things just penalize people for being successful. So it is not a surprise that people are practicing self-preservation and selecting those spouses who have nothing to gain from a separation (besides their freedom.) Additionally, as alluded to in the book above, people who have university degrees have only a 20% chance of divorce and usually, higher income earners have said university degrees.

> These days, an investment banker may marry another investment banker rather than a high school sweetheart, or a lawyer will marry another lawyer, or a prestigious client, rather than a secretary.

I'm all for reducing income inequality, but I find the complaints about assortive marriage to be, frankly, sexist. Sandra Day O'Connor graduated third in her class at Stanford Law, and was only offered jobs as a legal secretary in private law firms. Back then, a lot of smart, ambitious women were relegated to jobs that didn't maximize their intellectual potential because of sexism in the workplace. Now that sexism is subsiding, and women are free to pursue traditionally male jobs, of course you're seeing more couples marrying within their educational and economic class.

This is another in a long series of misdirections about income inequality by Tyler Cowen.

More details:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/11/desperate-effort-by-t...

>Of all the causes behind growing income inequality, in the longer run this development may prove one of the most significant and also one of the hardest to counter.

Well, that's pretty much why you chose to invent this little story, isn't it Tyler?

In unrelated news, robots are totally going to steal your job, which may prove one of the most significant and also one of the hardest causes of income inequality to counter:

https://www.aei.org/publication/will-robots-terminate-the-us...

This article is missing important info:

(1) This is much less interesting if the effect doesn't propogate, i.e. if income levels only lasts one generation. This is a crucial part of eugenics -- which the articles compares the effect to -- and yet nothing in the article suggests that income transfers generations. (I'm not saying it does or doesn't; just that the article doesn't address this at all.)

(2) The same is probably true for good looks, culture, athletic ability, hobbies, education, geography, race, IQ, and wealth. I suspect there are a number of confounding variables. Omitting any mention of them doesn't invalidate the reported results, but does make misinterpreting the results of the article much easier.

If you marry someone who is dissimilar to you in curiosity, interests, aspirations, and experiences (i.e. not someone in a similar place in society to you), then what the heck are you supposed to talk about for forty to sixty years?

In Evolutionary theory, Population Generics typically assumes random mating. But because of both assortative mating AND a secular trend toward geographical re-distribution across political, social, and economic factors (bankers in NY, techies in SF, etc) you have the potential makings of speciation: Homo Fund Manager, Homo Engineer? And which proto-species who would the first Mars colonists likely come from? Will a long family of engineers shun a potential husband because he stems from a long family of bankers?

Oh look! Journalists have opinions on other people's lives.