Inequality and Marriage article

Just thought this was interesting:

http://aeon.co/magazine/society/how-rising-inequality-is-changing-marriage/

It doesn’t really boil down to a single thing, but part of it is how sex ratios affect marriage markets. But if people tend to marry within the same socio-economic class (as they definitely tend to do at the top), what happens is that different strata of society have different sex ratios, in particular, the middle class seems to have more women than men, and the poorest tend to have more men than women.

It suggests that when large numbers of men have unstable jobs, women will tend to prefer to raise children on their own, rather than get married.

It also suggests that when women outnumber men (and therefore the men can afford to be cads), women tend to respond by getting more picky about their partners, which leads to some interesting paradoxes and tensions.

A hundred years ago, the poorest segment of society had much less job stability. And yet marriage rates were comparatively high and out-of-wedlock birth rates (even in the poorest segment) were much lower than today.

I find most of these “inequality” claims to be highly dubious. Especially since they never seem to be accompanies by any sort of statistically meaningful demonstrations of rising inequality. At least when it comes to society as a whole.

I think the article made a fairly sloppy connection to the inequality dynamic, but the way marriage markets change and what might be driving it is still interesting.

100 years ago, life expectancy was substantially lower, women had few options for work that could possibly support a family. So the pressures keeping people married and forcing them apart are interesting. Most of these claims are about how marriage has changed over the last 40-50 years. The legalization of no-fault divorce laws in the 1960s changed things immensely. It used to be that divorces had to have either abandonment, adultery, or extreme abuse to be legalized. As for births to unwed mothers, I haven’t seen the statistics from 100 years ago - perhaps you can provide them. It is true that in the past there was a lot more social pressure for people to get married if someone was pregnant.

But I think there are plenty of statistics about how capital is increasingly concentrated. The presence of increased inequity is not hard to establish. What the effects are are subject to debate and we won’t likely know the answer until the top of the pyramid finally owns everything, if even then.

This is like some mandatory humanities paper that I would have been forced to write in college, complete with references to obscure social studies books (in fact, I would not be surprised if it was recycled in some form).

The fundamentals of being a homemaker then versus now is so different that it’s close to impossible to contrast the two. For example, in 1905 majority of houses had fire burning ovens, manually cleaned their clothing etc. A household literally depended upon the ‘man’ to make money while the ‘woman’ supported the function of house, they needed eachother as it was largely impossible for one person to perform both roles.

Fast foward 100 years where just about everything in a traditional home is automated, even down to cleaning a floor. A woman or a man could work and take ‘care’ of the house which makes it easy for one of the two to seperate and go on their own as they’re largely not dependent upon eachother as they used to be historically.

Or did the robot cleaning tools accelerate because women went out to work and could not spend time on housework any more? Dun dun dunn…

I once stumbled upon some reputable statistics of out-of-wedlock births and estimates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy (based on timing). I don’t know where they are now. But lower-income women always had much higher rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy than higher-income people. Although 100 years ago, the absolute rates where about 1/10th of what they are today.

Interestingly, the rates seemed somewhat flat right up until the 1960s (shortly after the legalization of “the pill”). Logically (though I have not seen any data to support it), people are just having a lot more sex outside of marriage today. And it makes sense that poorer people, who are going to be less intelligent and less organized, will be more prone to accidental pregnancy.

Regarding income distribution, I think some statistics are more clear than others. For example, to say that the “one percent” has more wealth does say something about the one percent, but not really the rest of the distribution. The Gini Index actually declined in the US from 2000-2010, so I think a lot of these statistics conflict.

The article doesn’t seem to be loading for me, but doesn’t surprise me. People at the higher end of the socioeconomic ladder generally want to find somebody similar. Also I recall seeing stats where # of kids generally has an inverse relationship to income, so not only are people who are individually better off, they are marrying and having relatively fewer kids, leading to average higher wealth per person. Also income brackets intergenerationally tend to be sticky, so if you’re born into an upper middle class family, you’re far more likely to be there as an adult than somebody who was born to a lower income family. It all just kind of compounds over time.

I think there is no surprise that richer people don’t tend to want to get married or would choose to get married at later stages in life. Think about it, if you are well off you have less (or no) incentive to settle for one person and there is less pressure and incentive from the society to get married.

A lot of people marry to seek financial companionship! They get to share a flat, a mortgage, a car, tax credits, insurance, and the list goes on… if you are born rich and single, why do you need to get married to seek those benefits?

And when men have unstable jobs, women will NEED to raise children on their own.

I find your last comment surprising though. So you say when women > men, women become MORE picky? i thought it’s the other way around?

I do agree that people do date/ marry within their own socio-economical class, consciously or subconsciously. Think about it, how do people meet their spouses? Classmates? Friends? Colleagues? Neighbours?

They are likely to meet people who live similar lifestyles have similar jobs, can afford similar interests and hobbies. Yes sometimes rich men meet pretty salespeople and flight attendents and secretaries, but they don’t usually get married so that probably doesn’t add up to a large % of marriages.

That wasn’t my reasoning, it was just an observation the article made, and they linked it more to sex ratios than inequality per se.

As I understand it, the idea is that when there are more women than men, the men feel freer to act like cads because there are relatively more opportunities to try again if the relationship doesn’t work. In traditional theory, this would mean that women have to take what they can get and be more permissive with unfaithful mates, but the authors say they observe women becoming more picky, perhaps because they become extra risk averse now that men’s ability to cheat is better.

I found it strange that the article sounded like it was arguing against using sex-ratios as an explanation, but then came around to using it in other places. So I guess it’s a “yes, sex ratios, but also other things” kind of argument.

The article came up in a discussion in the dance community about unequal sex ratios and the point about how some women (generally the better [dancing] women) become more choosy when the sex ratio is unfavorable to them is what made the article come up.

I agree that the article only loosely discusses inequality, and to the extent that it does more through secondary effects like job stability. Often times, the authors don’t actually choose the title; rather, the editors choose something that seems trendy and catchy. It seems like the authors were trying to do a summary page on some of the findings of a book they were publishing.

Which is why i was surprised.

Think about it, if there are very few women and plenty of men, would women be LESS choosy then and just marry the first men they encounter? I think not.

I am not sure where she found her observation or rather, how she came up with that theory based on her data.

Another way to think about it is that a society with higher female ratios, that may mean more women in the workforce to support their families or they are just unmarried because they can’t find any compatible men - not necessarily being more or less choosy.

Got this gem in my inbox:

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can’t see the first one but the second one is mint.

nailed it.

I feel obligated to point out how one sided the cartoon is. Major “story of my victim complex” written by some zip who’s clearly got some bitterness issues. Obviously fathers never cheat and ditch.

Clearly, the guy is not in the top 20% of the dating pool.

(Or 6’2")

This.

You can easily switch figures and it will work the same way. Except she’ll be 17% (ahahaha) underpaid and still responsible for the most of the parenting. On a plus side - no time for depression :slight_smile:

You could also add the whole trying to date while being a single mom and not being able to find quality guys while the ex husband runs around with no responsabilities and less baggage. Anyhow, the whole thing is stupid. Basically falls under the whole “guys are jerks, women are the worst” category dominated by betas.

The gem seems accurate to me.

I actually don’t mind people (both men and women) with one-sided views like that to self-select themselves out of dating/marriage pool