Assortive Marriage

The Marriages of Power Couples Reinforce Income Inequality - The New York Times:

Marriage is a giant problem for the left since it is adaptive -- meaning "it works" to create better health, greater happiness, better outcomes for children, better societies and communities, and yes, higher incomes and wealth. I've covered this in more detail before.

It is also exceedingly old news that the biggest determinants of wealth and poverty in the US are:

1. Delaying having children until after marriage
2. Finishing High School
3. Staying married to the same spouse

The left doesn't much like to talk about these facts because their idea is that people have no responsibility for outcomes in their lives and the job of government is to randomize incentives and disincentives so people end up in the same economic state no matter what choices they make.

Naturally, like all ideas of the left, reality continues to cause them problems. It turns out that when it comes to marriage, once you have created a whole bunch of highly educated career women, they have a nasty tendency to marry some guy that is similar to them in education and income! Who could have imagined such a thing! They call this phenomenon "Assortive Marriage"

The numbers show that assortative mating really matters. One studyindicated that combined family decisions on assortative mating, divorce and female labor supply accounted for about one-third of the increase in income inequality from 1960 to 2005. That result is from the economist Jeremy Greenwood, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and other co-authors.

This is startling news to "liberals". It "creates inequality", DAMN!

They don't indicate what they want to try to DO about this ... for fairly obvious reasons. Arranged marriages maybe? 100% tax rate on one partner working over a certain income level? Since they WANT higher income women, perhaps they will declare that the husband of a woman that makes over say "$50 or $100K" can't work -- or just gets taxed at 100%?

No doubt their fertile minds are hard at work to make all equally miserable!


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