Marriage and Income Inequality

[Trader]

businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-13/marriage-and-income-inequality

While many people have posited that growing income inequality is due to the premium on education in our modern world, some Ivy League economists have discovered a more basic reason: people marry people with backgrounds similar to their own. This compounds the family income of people with good earning prospects.

If you want family income equality, require high potential MBA’s to marry high school dropouts. Good luck keeping people with very different experiences and values married. People who remain married also have huge economic advantages over those who never marry or marry and divorce, especially if they have children.

We may even get a study that says God designed marriage to be faithful, permanent, and open to new life as a great gift to the people he created to love and be loved.

 

[Ridgerunner]

This is quite obviously true.

There might be a dark side, though. I read an article about a British study strongly suggesting that there is an ever-narrowing gene pool among the highly educated. They tend to marry each other, generation after generation. This, the study suggested, was responsible for a disproportionately high defect rate in their offspring, at least in England.

It was probably less true in the U.S. at least for a time, as Irish married Germans, and their offspring married Italians or Poles. But over time, the gene pool might become shallower than one might suppose.

For example, after a few years of marriage, my wife (from Indiana) and I (from Mo), who met in school, learned we probably share some ancestors from Alsace. All of her ancestors were from there, as well as one of my grandmothers, and from a rather small part of Alsace. When you hear now and then that practically every U.S. president has some ancestor or other in common with nearly every other U.S. president, one begins to wonder just how widespread that is.

Where I live, virtually everyone is Scot-Irish and/or Welsh in ancestry, with a handful of others mixed in. One may wonder just how many boatloads of people, from a rather small place, account for the ancestors of them all. Probably not many. I have heard people from other parts of the country declare that “All of the people in Springfield (Mo) look alike”. Well, they don’t really, at least to me, but what are those people from other places seeing? Are they looking at a quarter of a million or so people all descended from one little wagon train of perhaps fewer than 100 people?

And then, among them, the intermarriage of people who went to college and whose parents did as well, all perhaps descended from the ten or so people on the wagon train that were the highest-achieving? Are there effects, both beneficial and not so beneficial from that?

Well, at least my son married a girl from the northeast. Brit and Irish. But then, I’m half Irish, sooooooo

 

[TCEL]

But over time, the gene pool might become shallower than one might suppose.

Side note: Especially if people keep convincing us young 'uns that donating our eggs and sperm is an act of charity!

 

[Cricket2]

I can only say: Oh good grief!

What seems to have always been practiced is that those of a given socioeconomic class stick with their own. Seldom does a person have a chance of moving up the ladder economically via marriage. Though some look for the chance and are what many would call “gold diggers.”

Income inequity exists because of greed, selfishness and sin. All along the way someone decides that certain positions/jobs are worth more than others, puts a hefty wage on the job and figures out who they want to collect the wealth. The rest of us do all the dirty work, get pennies for what we do, and are viewed as second class citizens. The only thing marriage has to do with it, is the upper class making sure they don’t mingle with the peons.

 

[stinkcat_14]

I wonder how much of this is due to geography. For example, many people with advanced degrees move to the Washington DC metro area because there are a lot of jobs there that pay in the top 5-10% of the income distribution and because the cost of living is high it is only people with advanced degrees who move there. Add in zoning regulations that raise the cost of housing and keep poor people out of the better areas and you get more geographic income segregation. Likewise, few people with advanced degrees move to rural areas because there are few ways to make a top 5-10% income in those areas.

 

[Fusiontron]

I live in the D.C. area and can straight up confirm that. Personally I plan to pursue a PhD and a high-salary job but plan to donate 50% of the salary and (hopefully) marry a girl teaching religious ed at a school. No interest in money or the accompanying lifestyle.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I can only say: Oh good grief!

What seems to have always been practiced is that those of a given socioeconomic class stick with their own. Seldom does a person have a chance of moving up the ladder economically via marriage. Though some look for the chance and are what many would call “gold diggers.”

Income inequity exists because of greed, selfishness and sin. All along the way someone decides that certain positions/jobs are worth more than others, puts a hefty wage on the job and figures out who they want to collect the wealth. The rest of us do all the dirty work, get pennies for what we do, and are viewed as second class citizens. The only thing marriage has to do with it, is the upper class making sure they don’t mingle with the peons.

This is true in the main, but I know lots of people who had nothing but are now quite well to do. I know many, many more who had nothing but who now have substantial assets and earnings.

It’s possible, of course, that the concentration at the top is delayed in places like this (the Ozarks) since almost nobody had anything only a few decades ago. Hard to be elitist no matter how much money you have, if your grandmother sits on her front porch rocker smoking a corncob pipe with a hound at her feet.

 

[JimG]

It may be unlikely for a person to move up the economic ladder through marriage. It is however, pretty easy to move down the economic ladder through lack of marriage. That’s why single mothers often tend to remain in poverty.

 

[Trader]

It may be unlikely for a person to move up the economic ladder through marriage. It is however, pretty easy to move down the economic ladder through lack of marriage. That’s why single mothers often tend to remain in poverty.

According to the Census Bureau, a family headed by a single woman is five times as likely to live in poverty as a family headed by a married couple, 40% vs 8%. For their definition of poverty, only income is counted. It does not include that single parent families have higher expenses for child care, medical care, legal work, and remedial education, so even with equal incomes, the single parent family is less well off. The disrespect of marriage is by far the #1 cause of poverty in America.

 

[shockerfan]

What seems to have always been practiced is that those of a given socioeconomic class stick with their own. Seldom does a person have a chance of moving up the ladder economically via marriage. Though some look for the chance and are what many would call “gold diggers.”

This might be true in some areas, but I would say a bigger factor is education. When a couple is done making “goo-goo eyes”, you actually have to have a conversation. If one person is educated and finds economics, politics, etc., interesting, and the other person is not educated and can’t hang in such a conversation, then there will be problems

Income inequity exists because of greed, selfishness and sin. All along the way someone decides that certain positions/jobs are worth more than others, puts a hefty wage on the job and figures out who they want to collect the wealth. The rest of us do all the dirty work, get pennies for what we do, and are viewed as second class citizens. The only thing marriage has to do with it, is the upper class making sure they don’t mingle with the peons.

1. On average, people are where they are at in life due to the sum total of the decisions they have made. The top students at my kid’s high school sacrificed, studied, avoided drugs, avoided pregnancy, and put in the effort to earn admittance to top schools, and have very bright futures. The kids at the bottom did not sacrifice, did not study, did not avoid drugs, got pregnant, and now have a very poor future. See a connection here?
2. Jobs pay, on average, proportionate to the value they add to the company, and proportionate to the number of people who can do the job. Its not some diabolical plot, its basic supply and demand.