by James A. Bacon
President Obama has made it plain that addressing income inequality will be the great theme of the rest of his presidency. Now is the time for all good liberals and progressives to follow his call — not just by seeking to tax the rich but by aligning their personal behavior with the values that they espouse and seek to impose upon others. One way would be to voluntarily contribute their excess income (above the national median) to the federal government, or at least to a philanthropic cause of their choice. As that does not seem likely, I advance another proposal: Pick different mates.
There are many causes of the disparity in incomes in American society, some economic and some social. Globalization has increased the rewards for the millionaires and billionaires who make it to the very top of the income pyramid. Our egalitarian-minded president has accentuated income disparities through his support of monetary policy that inflates stock and bond prices, thus rewarding the rich, while repressing interest rates, thus punishing small savers. Also, entitlements built up over the past 50 years incentivize dysfunctional behaviors that have kept an underclass mired in near-permanent poverty. Making life harder for those at the bottom, runaway immigration has swelled competition for jobs among unskilled workers, depressing incomes for lower-income Americans.
There’s not much that individual Americans can do to roll back globalization, alter U.S. monetary policy, reform entitlements or stop immigration. But we do have control over whom we marry and a modest degree of influence over whom our children marry. And that, it turns out, is a significant lever affecting income inequality.
Jeremy Greenwood, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, and co-authors from Germany and Catalonia estimate that what they call “assortative mating” accounts for more than 20% of income inequality in the U.S. (or, more accurately, 20% of the Gini coefficient, a measure of household income inequality). In “Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality,” Greenwood et al argue that income inequality intensified between 1960 and 2005 as women joined the workforce, married husbands with similar life prospects and created more two-income families.
Men and women tend to seek mates at comparable levels of education. College graduates tend to marry other college graduates. People with professional degrees tend to marry others with professional degrees. High school drop-outs tend to consort with other high school dropouts. That should come as no surprise: When it comes to choosing life partners, people gravitate to others who share similar interests, values, world views and lifestyle expectations as themselves.
Clearly, the trend to two-income households increases the disparities between those who marry and form stable family units on the one hand and those who do not. But the trend applies even to working women, with the effect most pronounced at the upper end of the income scale. At the 80th percentile the share that married women contributed to household income rose 18 percentage points, to 34 percent, between 1960 and 2005. At the 20th income percentile, the share of household income contributed by women increased only 12 percentage points, to 25 percent.
Liberals and progressives are not likely to urge their womenfolk to give up their jobs and put on an apron, so that really leaves only one alternative — stop marrying within your educational/social class. Millionaire liberal men, marry trailer park floozies! Hard-charging liberal women, marry a fitness instructor! (Hey, it works for Madonna.) Until you start changing your assortative behavior, you’re part of the problem you decry. Until then, I’ll take your exhortations to address income inequality about as seriously as I took Jim Bakker’s admonitions on family values, Jimmy Swaggart’s diatribes against homosexuality and Al Gore’s sermons on Global Warming.
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