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One of the other interesting implications of this gap, which is mostly attributable to education, is that it leads to far more income inequality, which in turn
by jawns 8y ago
One of the other interesting implications of this gap, which is mostly attributable to education, is that it leads to far more income inequality, which in turn leads to a host of nasty problems. For instance, as the divide between the haves and the have-nots becomes wider, it becomes harder to change one's station in life, leading to cycles of poverty.
In previous generations, people were more likely to marry outside of their education level and their family's economic class. So you might get a solidly middle-class, white-collar guy marrying a woman from a working-class family who never went to college, and they lived off one income.
But nowadays, it is much more likely that both spouses work, and also that people marry within their own class and education level. So, in general, you get either two low-income earners, two middle-income earners, or two high-income earners.
That greatly widens the household income gap, because now you're dealing with a combination of two incomes of roughly the same degree.
And so it becomes much harder for people to make changes to their economic status, because dual-income households are the norm, and if both spouses have to work, they have less time and opportunity, particularly at the lower end, to do things (like earn a degree) that might help them improve their economic status.
- nugget 8y agoThis is sometimes referred to as "assortive mating". In the 1970s, a male executive was more likely to marry his secretary and a male doctor was more likely to marry a nurse, and nobody would think that unusual. Culturally we have shifted away from those norms and nowadays the executive marries another executive or white collar professional and the doctor marries another doctor. This reinforces inequality in many ways (income, culture, parental education and involvement.) There don't seem to be any clear answers for how to address the implications of this trend.
- watwut 8y agoSecretary and nurse were pretty high far enough for women and neither could progress much further. Isn't it then still educated men marrying educated women relative to gender possibilities? The different seem to be only that women had lower level of education in general. A men at that time would only rarely marry up.
- gowld 8y agoAssortative mating exacerbates economic inequality, as the rich marry the rich, and the genetic consequences of assortative mating is a major hypothesis for the increase in autism diagnosis rate.
- taysic 8y agoTo be a nurse or secretary in those days were almost equivalent to a female executive today - simply because there were almost no female executives then.
- nojvek 8y agoI couldn’t disagree more. While there weren’t female executives then, a nurse != executive. One yields a lot more decision making power, responsibilities and possibly much higher salaries.