Half a century ago, men earned roughly 60% of college degrees. Today, women earn roughly 60% of college degrees. And the gap seems to be growing, as women outpace men in formal education.
2)Matching by educational attainment in the marriage market — marrying someone at a similar formal education level — is increasing.
Have you any insights or conjectures about how the seeming tension between these two trends eventually might shape politics?
Well.
On politics, assuming these trends lead to an increase in unmarried college-educated women and unmarried men without a college degree, it would seem to favor the Democrats. The women will vote ardently for Democrats, but a lot of the men will take out their frustration in other realms.
I would not count on the trends continuing. The bargaining power that college-educated men have enjoyed is probably not conducive to a healthy society. One indication of that is the backlash that has emerged as the #MeToo movement. But at some point college-educated women will discover that to restore their bargaining power exit works better than voice, as it were. They could create more competition among males by finding alternatives to the college degree as ways of qualifying men as marriage material. The process of coalescing around such alternative signals may take a while, but it is something to watch for.
What does “But at some point college-educated women will discover that to restore their bargaining power exit works better than voice, as it were” mean?
If the supply of what you want decreases relative to demand, you lose bargaining power and have to pay a steeper price to get what you want. Maybe you would pay the price at the time out of pressure, desperation and duress, but then later still complain that you were exploited and treated unfairly, and that such high prices ought never to be paid by anybody, regardless of scarcity, bargaining power, the momentary voluntariness of the transaction, or the efficiency of allocation.
One see this in areas affected by hurricanes where the petroleum supply chain is disrupted and normal service restoration not expected for some extended period.
There is some human instinct that feels this is ‘gouging’ and an unfair unexpected windfall gain for the sellers, and many places have laws against it. People also get indignant about Uber’s ‘surge’ pricing on New Year’s Eve or after a sporting event, since everybody wants a ride at the same time, but not everybody can get one, or about trying to get hotel rooms at popular events, which can go for many multiples of normal prices. In DC, commuting drivers became irate at the first day of tolls on I-66 when ‘congestion’ pricing raised the cost to very high amounts.
It is also perceived as unfair if one particular buyer tries to ‘hoard’ and buy a quantity far in excess of normal consumption, to keep all to herself in case of prolonged shortage. It is perceived as somehow a ‘fairer’ allocation if the sellers merely sell out, at normal prices, and at normal quantities per buyer, even though allocation is achieved inefficiently according to race winners (or to close, personal friends of the sellers, or political allies of the allocators) instead of efficiently by highest bidder. That’s some of the logic behind ‘rent control’.
Something to note is that many of these instincts seem to trigger in circumstances of a salient amount of scarcity and for which there is very low elasticity of supply, such that ‘bidding’ gives rise to a Ricardian rat race which extracts the highest price from the consumers with the lowest bargaining power.
All of this applies to the sexual (or ‘romantic matching’) market as well, which is highly competitive. In a ‘scarce desirable males’ environment, many women will have to pay a high behavioral price to have romantic access to such males, perhaps to some degree as part of an instinctive gamble that they will be able to win the exclusive romantic commitment of one of them. A price worth paying if it all works out in the end, as it were, but if it doesn’t, then they’ll end up feeling gouged, as it were.
The thing about gouging is that there’s no objective, non-arbitrary dividing line between ordinary price rises or volatility as a result of the market trying to clear supply and demand, and true ‘gouging’. So there is a wide area of ambiguous uncertainty in which both buyers, sellers, and independent observers can be of very different minds regarding whether true ‘gouging’ passing some threshold of ‘wrongfulness’ has actually occurred or not.
So one can imagine a situation is which gouging is a crime, but the pressure of scarcity and dreadful prospect of going without left a buy feeling too intimidated to argue about price at the moment of sale when upsetting the seller could just cause him to walk away and sell to someone else, leaving one high and dry. So one buys at the moment, but when the situation becomes clearer later, one comes to realization that one was actually ‘gouged’, and files a complaint with the police.
That’s like ‘voice’. Lots of women getting gouged in the a situation of desirable-male scarcity, then filing complaints about it later on. The problem is that there is little justice in that system, as it is widely observed that guilty sellers often get off scot-free, while innocent sellers still get punished. So consequences are so uncorrelated with underlying behaviors, sellers view them as bad luck like getting hit with a bolt of lightning, and the equilibrium is one in which there is still a lot of gouging, and still a lot of complaining.
There are a few potential remedies or alternatives to that state of affairs.
One solution is to impose price controls by forming a buyer’s collective union, ‘trust’, or cartel, in which everyone agrees to abide by certain rules and restraints. Everyone in the class must join the union, and no one in the union is allowed to ever pay higher than X price for any romantic match. And no buyer may hoard, which is to say, consumer more than a normal amount of supply at any time.
The classic problem with cartels is that, without the backstop of something equivalent to government enforcement of punishments against defectors, they tend to break down because the incentive to cheat and evade detection is too high. Women may try to establish a sexual norms cartel that punishes women who pay high prices, but that is not realistic in the current ideological environment in which, if anything, things are trending in the opposite way as norms of those nature which restrict female sexual autonomy are perceived as ‘patriarchal’.
Another approach would be to regulate the sellers, as with rent control or anti-gouging laws. One would have to recruit the government – or some equivalently certain and intimidating amount of private enforcement or social pressure – to make this effective to adjust the market equilibrium. Sellers will respond to the incentive of the risk and adjust allocation to choose buyers by some method or norm other than mere behavioral ‘price’, probably some proxy for ‘low risk of gouging complaint’. The irony is that in this case, the sellers will determine the buyer-selection behavioral criteria, instead of the buyers determining it for themselves, which is arguably more ‘patriarchal’.
The problem with that approach is that the rules and consequences for behavior have to be clear, certain, predictable, and stable. Unfortunately, our current society has no no mechanism to produce stable agreement on those rules and consequences, so every transaction is a kind of two-sided gamble in which it is possible for both sides to lose. As a consequence, the new equilibrium has the effect of not raising buyers’ bargaining power, but of causing all kinds of perverse distortions that lower net social welfare overall, and which actually cause risk-averse sellers to restrict their already scarce supply even further on the margin.
Another potential approach is to try to increase the supply or make it more elastic.
One could, for example, disproportionately import a lot more desirable sellers, to mitigate the scarcity and balance the market.
One could also take approaches which could involve some creativity and collective shift of selection criteria and identification of new proxies, or, more likely, use of new technologies.
So, perhaps in the past, out of pragmatic convenience and low mobility and high costs to obtain information outside one’s local social scene, one’s potential market for romantic interests would be practically restricted to the students one knows, tending to be in one’s own age range, or those who can be met in person nearby or through one’s social connections.
Enter the internet, and suddenly, the number of potential sellers explodes, as does one’s information regarding their willingness to deal and relative value among other sellers.
The flip-side of that solution is that all the other distance buyers – facing the same problem as the local buyers – also now have access to one’s local sellers. So, it doesn’t really work out on average, and only individually when one is disparately adept at winning in the broader, internet-enabled marketplace.
It’s not really possible to go further with the discussion without getting into the precise ‘utility functions’ and preference curves of the market participants, a constructive and frank (and public) conversation about which is not really possible under current social constraints.
This is a remarkably good post and clarified a lot of ideas for me that apply more broadly than the subject under discussion. Thanks for writing it out.
… to restore their bargaining power exit works better than voice, as it were” mean?
Are you familiar with the voice – exit distinction?
Women are probably better off starting new institutions that referee relationships, rather than reforming the old institutions.
One should never talk about the population as a whole when analyzing these trends.
“College degree” means something quite different for men than for women. There are any number of low pay, relatively low-status female jobs that require a college degree: kindergarten teacher, nurse, social worker. There are quite a few high pay, reasonably high status mostly male jobs that don’t require a college degree: military careers, skilled trades. (In contrast, female skilled trades generally require the equivalent of an AA degree: beautician, manicurist).
All sorts of plumbers are married to all sorts of secretaries. Many nurses are married to NCOs.
For whites and Asians, which have a female-male ratio of 56-44, that’s plenty of fudge factor. It’d have to get a lot worse.
Hispanics are 60-40. Blacks are 64-36. In both cases, though, a likely big chunk is in social worker, nurse, and elementary school teacher, all careers that would be perfectly happy matched with electrician or fork lift operator.
I would disagree with you that a nursing job requiring a college education are relatively low paying. Those kinds of nursing jobs tend to be middle class to upper middle class jobs, especially for nurses who specialize in a certain field (I know at least one oncology nurse who has a six figure salary, and I don’t think that is all that unusual).
Oddly enough, there was an article in the New York Times today about the for profit cosmetology school racket. Community colleges are the alternative. Both offer an AA degree.
You don’t get an AA degree to be a plumber–at least, I dont’ think you do.
Do we have any plumbers reading this? I’ve been told by a plumber that their education was classes at night after work. They went out on jobs during the day as aspiring tradesmen who had been accepted as trainees, and then they went to class at night. Classes tended to stress the characteristics and limitations of the various materials they might expect to encounter, and in theory should know something about, even though some materials were ubiquitous and others were pretty rare.
Presumably this is where they learned about building code–and on the job.
Much of what they learned was on the job. Training was mostly on the job training, observing, working under supervision. The plumber I talked to had a father who was a utility lineman for a gas and electric company. His father had him work on projects at home from an early age.
Then he joined the navy.
The plumber I talked to said slots to enter the trade were limited–at least when he got in. At one point, wanting to get into the trade after getting out of the navy, he worked in a plumbing supply warehouse for a “holding pattern” (the way planes waiting to land at the airport circle in a holding pattern).
There are definitely plumbing courses at community colleges- and when I looked into the ones near me, they actually seemed to have quite competitive admissions, which is understandable, given that working as a plumber can pay pretty well. I would suspect, along with Mr. Abbot, that people in those programs work as apprentices while completing the program, as the program itself is selective enough to indicate to potential employers that anyone in the program has enough of a work ethic (and intelligence) to know some math and to get decent grades.
A former student of mine wanted to get a diesel mechanic certification and enrolled in a program at a local state college. One of the requirements was a 2 semester course called something like “technical physics”. It was actually a plain vanilla non-selective-college level Physics 101/102. It had nothing directly to do with fixing diesel engines.
Though a very good mechanic, he was not academically inclined and came to me because he was lost. With a little work, he was able to get an A and B, but a number of his friends (who he seemed to think were good mechanics) just flamed out of the course.
My son is a plumber. He learned on the job but his boss pays for any of his plumbers to go to school, my son went for a while but quit because he hates school which is why he is a plumber in the first place. I think you can work as a plumber here in Florida without going to school to get a license but a plumbing business must have at least one licensed plumber.
Where do you get this idea that women don’t already have more-than-equal bargaining power in both the job and marriage markets?
To the extent I notice a change in the balance in either area, it is that women, through biased laws, have made themselves more costly (both in money and in accommodations required) both to hire and to marry, to the extent that rational managers and rational men are starting to avoid doing either. I expect this trend, predictable by LeChatelier’s Principle, to continue until and unless the laws start to move back toward equality (which I see as approximately the 1970 situation).
I think it’s more likely we end up recognizing that one woman per man in a lifelong marriage commitment is not really the norm. Across time and cultures it’s kind of an abnormality.
Further down the status hierarchy women are deciding that some kind of single motherhood (with men sometimes entering and exiting their lives) is OK compared to marrying low status men. For women of high status a lot are simply growing old without marrying or having children. In elite circles there does seem to be status involved in child bearing (look at how many $40k tuitions our family can pay for), but for most UMC people in coastal cities it’s a struggle to afford children while maintaining UMC status so they go without.
Another commentator noted that a lot of this struggle will get filtered through support/sanction of bureaucratic professions (which favor women) versus thing manipulation like trades (which favor men). If women become more politically powerful and less attached to their men expect this to manifest in economic/political effects as well.
Further, if we note Handle’s theory that as we move away from employment in measurable, scalable, and improvable industries (manipulating things) to “cost disease” hard to measure bureaucratic service industries we can expect to see a slowdown in economic growth.
Kind of an abnormality for mass adoption by the *vast* majority of the population .
The bargaining power that college-educated men have enjoyed is probably not conducive to a healthy society.
“Striking effect: New study finds couples are more likely to divorce when the woman experiences a big promotion (becoming mayor, MP, or CEO). No effect for men.” https://twitter.com/page_eco/status/1075339519161843712
Women tend to care more than men do about a mate’s relative status. (Think of Kissinger’s observation that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Did any man ever become attracted to a woman with Kissinger’s looks because she acquired power?) I suspect marriage rates are crashing in part because we’ve inadvertently made it harder for women to “marry up.” Is that trend conducive to a healthy society?
Libertarians seem to judge increased autonomy as an unequivocal good without considering whether in specific instances it also increases atomization, and thereby reduces real happiness.
The best description of love that I know is: “Love is an exchange of dependencies.” Also, studies have show that most women would give up sex before chocolate.
In the past, men brought financial security into a relationship, in exchange for constant sex. As women become more educated, and by extension more financially secure, they have less need for men. That probably explains a large part of the high divorce rate in Western society. Also, fertility rates correlate inversely with female literacy rates. The welfare state means there is no need to have children for financial security in old age. That lack of children becomes a collective action problem at the societal level.
Europe’s fertility rate is at 1.6 which is well below the 2.1 replacement fertility rate required to maintain a stable population. Countries like Italy and Spain are approaching the 1.3 fertility rate which demographers call the “lowest low”. No society has ever recovered from a fertility rate below 1.3. The fertility rate in other countries including the US is now trending lower.
This doesn’t end well.
fertility rate… This doesn’t end well.
I don’t know about this. We can’t grow forever; it seems we should be able to work the option where we do less.
And it seems eminently correctable. When confronted over his battlefield losses, Napoleon was purported to have dismissed the criticism, saying that “the women of France can raise up any number of men” (in more ribald terms).
“Should we worry about low domestic population growth rates” is actually a fascinating question, along with typical follow-up questions of “What could be done about it, and should any of that be done?”, and I hope Arnold gives his take on it one day.
Probably easier and less conversationally distracting to do the analysis assuming no significant immigration, as with the Japanese situation. But of course one if one was genuinely indifferent regarding interchangeable human widgets, then developed countries can clearly import their way to any overall population growth rate if they wanted to.
Obviously it’s possible to get into big trouble with funding inter-generational transfer programs if badly funded to begin with, and especially if old people live longer and cost more than expected, and there are fewer young people, who also have lower wages than once expected a generation ago. There are all kinds of ways to deal with the problem, but which may turn out to be as politically tough as whatever would be necessary to nudge fertility rates.
One would want to look for areas in which aggregate size of the economy or population has collective impacts that have positive returns to scale, and geopolitical power (economic and military) is usually considered to be such an area. Of course the trade-off for those are be amenities that have negative returns to scale, or which improve with a shrinking population.
It’s also possible to worry about the age distribution and profile of the whole population. A shrinking population is an old population, and in democracies tend to be risk-averse gerontocracies. Those effects may be more subtle.
It’s worth noting that it’s seems to be politically correct to worry about population quantity, even without having to state the reasons why, but it is completely politically incorrect to worry about population quality, even when it is easy to marshall strong arguments in support of the proposition, and truly stunning evidence of current disparities in natality statistics.
It is ok to fret about people having fewer kids on average, but not about who, in particular, is having or not having those kids. Even if one uses the Charles Murray approach and only talks about one sub-population to avoid the typical motivated hypersensitivity regarding racial matters, it is still pretty hard to discuss realistically in public without being called nasty names.
Also don’t forget sex and marriage globalisation. A high-income white male can attract a mate from a global pool of females. It doesn’t work the opposite way much at all. There is no need for an educated, high-income white male to even bother with a white female when he has so many other options available. Lets be honest here: Why would any white man want a white female his own age and status with all their flaws–fat, narcissistic, over-privileged, insecure etc. etc–when he can have a slim, attractive young thing with the old-fashioned values he craves straight off the global supply chain?
There has never been a better time to be a high-end white male. White females need to realise that until they slim down and re-learn female subservience they will be find themselves the victims of mate outsourcing. The #MeToo tantrums won’t help one little bit.
The person who wrote that is a bad, bad person. He is obviously white and male and an oppressor and a Trump voter. A perfect example of the American right. He needs to check his privilege.
Is that what you wanted someone to say, “Barson Wells”?
“There has never been a better time to be a high-end white male.”
I think you forgot to include “shallow”.
Risky, very risky. That’s why so few are doing it. Also it’s considered low status in some circles.
I was not hoping for that response. But very NPC it is. You could not have signalled your virtue louder. I’m not an American and I live in Asia-Pacific, so I can’t be American right or vote for Trump.
And what is wrong with calling out fat, narcissistic, over-privileged white females?
I am not going check my white privilege either. Why should I? You should see the benefits I get from it
LOL!
The truth hurts.
They were being sarcastic. Your inability to detect that is actually a clue that you’re telling the truth, that you’re not an American. On the other hand you invoked the virtue signaling meme, which makes me think you should have picked up on the the sarcasm.
Seconded. Even by internet standards, that was clearly sarcasm, although I think it was meant to insult both woke trolls and Barson Wells, as what Barson Wells wrote is also very trolly.
You read my mind.
NPC!!!!
Got it. Hahahaaaaaahaha! I cant stop laughing!
Racist
“But at some point college-educated women will discover that to restore their bargaining power exit works better than voice, as it were. They could create more competition among males by finding alternatives to the college degree as ways of qualifying men as marriage material.”
I know that I am echoing Barson Wells here, but who is to say that non-college educated men will consider these single, college-educated women as good marriage material? I am less skeptical than he is, but I do think that there is often a values mismatch between college educated women and non-college educated men (just look at the voting patterns). That is just a way of saying that I don’t think it is going to happen, because if it made sense, it already would be happening. The college degree isn’t a proxy for status, wealth, etc., rather that matching of college educated men and women is a result both of proximity, but also of shared values (the values of the white collar world and people who work in bureaucracies), values that aren’t shared nearly so much across those class lines. Not that I am saying one is better than the other; I haven’t really thought through and come to a firm opinion on that yet, except that I think that whatever cultures produce stable marriages and fathers who are involved in their kids lives (good for both kids and fathers) are better, ceteris paribus.
+1 the whole comment
Arnold,
Thank you for fielding my question! Thanks also to commenters for their interesting observations.
As more women get college degrees, the “college degree premium” will decrease.
I’m pretty sure the pro-life Christians, Mormons, Amish; and US Muslims (yes, they’re usually pro-life) will continue to average more than 2 kids for married couples. In a few demographic generations, the pro-life couples will reproduce more.
Still, good looking, college educated, successful alpha-males will increasingly be able to find women who let them do … anything. Anything? Anything, kiss them, grab them by their… See how many Rich/ Famous guys are easily able to trade in one current relationship for a “newer model”.
I see the #MeToo movement as partly recognition by women that they have been, literally, screwed by the Sex Liberation changes. Successful men want hot young beauties for sex. They may but might not be willing to give love to get the sex.
Already many coeds think they need to give sex just to get asked out on dates. Silly college coeds too often think they are getting love on hookups, but they’re actually just being test-ridden. Which the #MeToo folk are against, rightly; but there needs to be new dating/ relationships changes.
The new changes need to be accepted by most women. With women as desperate buyers (of high status men), the limited supply of such men insure the alphas will have access to women, but the women will have uncertain access to loving husbands. (Clinton? Trump? Weiner? Cosby? H. Ford? C. Eastwood?)
Meanwhile, ever more “uneducated (no college)” women are accepting, without shame, having a baby (or 4?) out of wedlock, and accepting Uncle Sugar to pay most of the bills “for the children”, while they remain barely responsible. An under-class is being created, and will continue to grow and be more obvious (mostly those not raised by mother-father pair). That’s not good, and is a bigger problem than too many easy women in college, but for college women the latter is a more relevant problem.
It should also be mentioned — coeds who are virgins remain in quite high demand (tho quite rare). I’d expect more women to look more towards marriage night losing of their virginity — but I don’t see this; there was talk of “promise rings” a few years ago, but much less recently.
It seems likely that there will actually be a lot more “yes means yes” required consent before seduction, tho I can also believe some backlash that says something like “if she removes her panties, she is consenting”.
Career oriented unmarried female grads over 30 will increasingly have problems finding any faithful husbands. They’ll become more disappointed, and angry — at the society most created by the (that’s not funny) feminists.