Tyler Cowen quotes a paper by Robert D. Mare.
Spousal resemblance on educational attainment was very high in the early twentieth century, declined to an all-time low for young couples in the early 1950s, and has increased steadily since then. These trends broadly parallel the compression and expansion of socioeconomic inequality in the United States over the twentieth century. Additionally, educationally similar parents are more likely to have offspring who themselves marry within their own educational level. If homogamy in the parent generation leads to homogamy in the offspring generation, this may reinforce the secular trend toward increased homogamy.
Commenters here have argued about this in the past. Evidently, the facts show that the Mad Men era did indeed have lower assortative mating.
My guess is that eventually the conventional wisdom is going to transition from a Whig History view of the late 20th century – where we keep getting ‘progress’ along multiple dimensions (economic, social, political, technological) simultaneously and in a monotonic fashion – to something like Hanson’s ‘Dreamtime’ view of the postwar-thru-great-moderation era.
That is, a special ‘market bubble’-like time of historical uniqueness in which certain technological trends ran well ahead of various Malthusian pressures for zero-sum resources, and relaxed the pressure so much that it really did become an ‘era of the everyman’, but following which most of the social patterns regress towards their historical norms.
Many commentators of a certain age – almost regardless of their political orientation, tellingly – are quite nostalgic for the ‘peak expectations for everyone’ period of this era, and of course like to leverage their pet theories and bad guys for why things seems to be stagnating or going ‘backwards’ these days in many ways.
But eventually people will recognize that it was an inevitable and technologically-determined outcome and there was really nothing any non-radical political intervention could have done to stop it.
That certainly wasn’t written from a Chinese, South Korean, or Indian perspective — places where standards of living have never advanced so rapidly for so many millions as they have during the last few decades. I can’t help but pull out the famous quote from Macaulay:
“We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell
us that society has reached a turning point, that we have
seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with
just as much apparent reason … On what principle is it
that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are
to expect nothing but deterioration before us.”
The principle is this: that technological progress and demographic trends have made some valuable things less scarce but while also making other things more scarce, or even zero-sum and subject to Red Queen’s races. It’s no good to adopt a Boolean or Manichean mentality and just to say whether things are going up or down, are Malthusian or not.
Some things are, some things aren’t, and whether or not that means an improvement in your standard of living depends on how important those factors are related to your individual preferences an in terms of being able to exploit your comparative advantage.
In general, the things that have become less scarce (say, per man-hour of labor at average productivity) are working capital, calories, unskilled labor, manufactured goods, and almost anything associated with IT.
The things that have become more scarce are prime, central real estate, high-prestige education credentials, high-prestige jobs (like tenured professorships), health care services, and labor with a special combination of talent and productivity.
The increase in living standards in the developing world is a product of being able to benefit – and catch up to first world levels of consumption – from the reduction in scarcity of things of the first type.
But in the developed world the picture is more mixed, especially depending on where you are in the overall labor-market distribution, with some benefit from having more of the first type of things, but some increasingly difficulty with having less of the second type of thing to go around on average.
I am no fan of Piketty and I think his narrative and math is bunk, however, he has put together some interesting charts like the ones here that are still useful for seeing when things in the US started to turn the corner somewhere in the 70’s and, like I said, started regressing towards historical norms after the brief but pleasant holiday.
So I might very well turn your usage of that Macaulay quote on its head and ask “On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but continuance of these trends for the last three decades at least, we are to expect anything but their continuance before us?”
I worry a lot more about continued growth and absolute well-being than I do about income inequality — I have more wealth and income than I need and really don’t care if Mark Zuckerberg is worth 50 or 500 billion. What’s more, I believe I could live a rich, interesting life on far less than I earn now, and even far less than the US median — like these guys:
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
As I see it, the only way income inequality is truly going to make us worse off is if the politics of envy succeed in imposing statist policies that FUBAR economic growth.
Absolute well-being (a philosophically shaky concept to begin with) is exactly what I’m talking about, not consequences of ‘income inequality’ per se. And you are very fortunate to have lots of wealth, but I’m afraid that happy circumstance will become increasingly rare for our descendants.
Here is the distilled version of the point I am making. Whenever some resource becomes essential to live and earn a lucrative living and has a significantly zero-sum nature, then agents in a competitive market will eventually bid the price of those assets right up to the point where all their surplus income disappears.
Most young folks start out with nothing or in heavy debt, and facing those high prices and competition, most will end up having to live paycheck to paycheck since there won’t be much left after paying for (1) Rent, (2) Prestigious Education Credentials, (3) Health Premiums, (4) Taxes. These are the things the prices of which tend to rise to eat away any gain in incomes that would otherwise be surplus. Food, clothing, transportation, entertainment, and IT have much more elastic supplies with lower marginal costs.
As I explained previously, what is happening in the world – first in the most developed countries, but eventually everywhere, is that as the production of certain objects or services becomes increasingly automated, the only jobs that are left, can pay well, and to which the whole labor market is re-equilibrating will be those that require a worker to be geographically close to various counterparties. It is easy to observe that in almost every country (and even on a global level for some fields) whole white-collar sectors are centralizing in one or two major hubs in which real estate rents continue to reach for the sky.
These workers simply have no choice but to bid up rents to the point that they – or other trade-offs like commuting – become so painful that they equalize with their best alternative opportunity (BAO).
But in a world of intense specialization, it is simply infeasible for most people to switch from one lucrative career track to another, and so their BAO is at a much lower level of compensation, especially if most of their industry is concentrated in one hub. A lot of people resist believing in the overwhelming trend of increasingly centralization into hubs – maybe you could call it ‘hyper-urbanization’ – but it’s easy to observe if you look at the data.
Libertarians and some progressives are keen to recommend relaxation of rules that prevent denser building, but just like with traffic, you will just get induced demand and Jevons problems. Plenty of other cities have built way up and very dense, but their rents always go back up to the very edge of affordability.
This is of course a modern – and much more comfortable – form of the classical Malthusian dynamic, in which the rents for land for food production would go up to the edge of survival. What is happening is that today, the rents for land for white-collar work are going up to the edge of those otherwise high incomes.
And the big trouble is that, of course, only a small fraction of people really earn those high white-collar incomes. But the hubs in which they work act as anchors for the local economic ecosystem, and people doing ordinary low-skill, low-pay, proximate-service work, have to survive in that expensive environment as well.
Complaining about these ‘pecuniary externalities’ is out of fashion, but it remains valid to attribute the struggle of this growing class of workers to the mechanism I’ve described above.
You’re no doubt right that a “golden era” of the common man like the postwar period could not go on forever – nothing does. But I can think of at least one policy that undoubtedly hastened the end of that era: mass immigration.
Come to think of it, another policy change probably played a role in this: the movement of women into the job market.
The best comment on MR was that using educational achievement as a proxy for class has obvious problems. In 1900, higher-education was unusual for both sexes, so you’d naturally get a high measure. By mid-century, during the post WWII era, college attendance became much more of a mass phenomenon — but mostly for men, so a lower measure was unavoidable (during that period, there weren’t enough college-educated women to go around). And now, higher education is common for both sexes, so assortative mating has risen again (though if the 60:40 female predominance in higher-ed continues, it may fall again). So it seems that different measures are needed. Either parent’s family income or even father’s educational attainment as measures of class would have fewer problems.
I suspect that if one could analyze based on IQ, one would find that nothing had really changed from the early 20th century to today.
Wonder if this has in any way contributed to rising autism rates.
Yes. And the rise in things like ADHD too.
Several points:
1) Is educational attainment the right variable to use here? With discrimination in the workforce, women going to college and getting high paying careers was unusual. So the study results are skewed by different education goals for males and females in the Post-War Period. In reality, college educated men were marrying within their class but many middle class women did not go to college.
2) It was the 1950s and we went through WW2. The Post-War period had tremendous changes to the US class structure so it is the historical outlier.
3) Steve Sailer pointed out men got married at an exceptionally young age in 1950 – 1960. (I believe it was 22 which is a historical lowpoint.) So men were meeting spouses in High School and College when people are interacting with more people from different backgrounds. (Isn’t that what the Breakfast Club was about? I dated people from different classes in college.) Now most people are meeting spouses after 25 which means they are interacting with more similar people. (Note the acceptance of birth control has HUGE contributing factor here.)
4) Why are you so bothered by ‘more assortative mating?’ Noticed the divorce rate has dropped a lot since the late 1970s and that is a very good thing. IMO this change was a good trend not a bad one.
4. Who is bothered?
[Given usual yammerings about correlation and causation…]
It seems the way to reduce income inequality — whether this is a social good or not is something to argue in another post — is to forbid a post-grad (PhD, JD, MD, some engineers, maybe, and perhaps even a few MS) from marrying someone that has a degree higher than a high-school diploma, right?
(Looking at the hot DrWife, I wll NOT be the first for this trend…)