For analytical purpose, I classified each individual’s income by the decile he or she occupied in the income distribution of the 1980 and 2008–2012 analytic samples, respectively. My study showed that for a majority of couples, husbands were in a higher income decile than their wives regardless of the time period and the educational pairing of spouses.
Using sophisticated statistical models (log-linear models) to control for gender differences and shifts in marginal distributions of education and income, I found that the tendency for women to marry up in income was greater when they married down in education: Women were 93 percent more likely to marry men in higher income deciles than themselves among couples in which the wife had more education than the husband than among couples in which the wife had less education than the husband.
Pointer from David French. The paper itself appears to be gated. It seems pertinent to a post from a couple of weeks ago.
Ungated (thanks Sci-Hub): https://sci-hub.tw/10.1111/jomf.12372
Interesting.
Here is a link to an ungated version (2014) of Yue Qian’s study: https://paa2015.princeton.edu/papers/152519
A related trend, which you you noted in a blogpost on December 3, 2018 (http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/assortative-mating/):
Individuals are marrying at a later age, when income prospects of potential spouses are clearer. This trend enables more reliable sorting by earnings.
As you noted in your 12/3/18 blogpost, this trend is identified in a working paper by Arpaslan Tuncay, “Assortative Mating and Inequality” (November 19, 2018). Here is the full abstract of Tuncay’s paper:
“Abstract
This paper studies the evolution of assortative mating based on the permanent wage (the individual-specific component of wage) in the U.S., its role in the increase in family wage inequality, and the factors behind this evolution. I first document a remarkable trend in the assortative mating, as measured by the permanent-wage correlation of couples, from 0:3 for families formed in the late 1960s to 0:52 for families formed in the late 1980s. I show that this trend accounts for more than one third of the increase in family wage inequality across these family cohorts. I then argue that the increased marriage age across these cohorts contributed to the assortative mating and thus to the rising inequality. Individuals face a large degree of uncertainty about their permanent wages early in their careers. If they marry early, as most individuals in the late 1960s did, this uncertainty leads to weak marital sorting along permanent wage levels. But when marriage is delayed, as in the late 1980s, the sorting becomes stronger as individuals are more able to predict their likely future wages. After providing reduced-form evidence on the impact of marriage age, I build and estimate a marriage model with wage uncertainty, and show that the increase in marriage age can explain almost 80% of the increase in the assortative mating.”
We do have to keep in mind that many college degrees are pretty vocational rather than horizon-expanding. There has been steady credential inflation in eds-and-meds fields (with the goal of increasing status and restricting entry to raise salaries–and also to provide more revenue for institutions offering training). So occupations that used to require a 2-year or bachelor’s degree now demand a master’s degree or ‘clinical doctorate’. This seems to have afflicted female-dominated jobs much more male-dominated ones (you still don’t need a bachelor’s degree for any building trades nor any degree at all to be a software developer — Gates and Zuckerberg both dropped out of Harvard, etc).
But is a physical therapist who has a ‘doctorate’ who weds an electrician really marrying down? It seems to me a better measure of marrying up vs down would be to compare the status of the bride’s and groom’s respective families.
Indeed. I’m not sure female “HR cubicle drone” has a status premium over “successful male plumber”.
The question is how many male plumbers earning above average wages can there be (the above average part should give a hint). Also, a lot of trades still require a decent IQ threshold.
The relevant question seems to be, “in cases where male income doesn’t increase female living standards significantly beyond what the female can achieve on her own (working or not working)”, how much of an incentive to get married is there?
Asking if a person making 80k as a plumber can enhance the lifestyle of someone making 50k in HR doesn’t really answer that question.
I guess I am confused a bit by this framing; “in cases where male income doesn’t increase female living standards significantly beyond what the female can achieve on her own (working or not working)”, how much of an incentive to get married is there?”
Is the question this; when a man’s income doesn’t change the living standards of a woman, how much incentive is there to get married?
If that is the question, one thing that I have always found a bit odd is that there aren’t more marriages, and stable marriages, among folks earning, say, $25k a year ($12.5/hour if a person works 2000 hours in a year). If both the man and the woman earn around that much, getting hitched essentially doubles their pool of monetary resources, and as has been oft said, two can live more cheaply than one. Plus they can share chores such that each person spends less time overall on household work, errands, etc.
A single woman making 25k a year is entitled to lots of lots of government benefits for herself and children.
A married woman with a family income of 50k loses some of those benefits. It may be that, in real terms after considering government transfers, that the total family income hasn’t increased much beyond the 25k from when the woman was single.
At least that is my understanding of effective marginal tax rates at that income level.
The issue is that in order to end that effective marginal tax rate, you would need to extend the kind of benefits the very poor get up the income ladder until most people are receiving those benefits. That’s a budgetary challenge.
P.S. It’s not just cash transfers. The poor are eligible for lots of free services. One thing the UBI crowd never grapple with is that extending “welfare” up the income ladder likely also means extending things like medicaid and other social services whose cost and economic distortion is not as predictable as a UBI.
P.P.S. Putting marginal tax rates aide, this doesn’t even get into the fact that even at 25k (with medical care and such being taken care of by the government), there isn’t some fundamental change in living standards that happens at 50k versus 25k. Each likely has “a roof over their head and food on the table”. I have no doubt that extra 25k (minus the costs of the extra person) would mean some good changes in life, but its not like its a life or death thing. For some of these women, the positives of being single may outweigh the meager change in living standards that would come from a mate making 25k. Or at least they perceive it as outweighing being married (their judgement is I suppose is as possibly flawed as any of ours, or they may know they don’t like the decisions they make but not know how to make better ones).
I think you have answered your own question (or maybe it is rhetorical one?). A man needs to earn quite a bit of money (and probably at least the median or above median of men’s salaries) to convince a woman that getting married is a good deal for her.
I think the median earnings for men was around $49k in the US in 2017. I guess I am wondering if say, earnings of $40k would be enough on top of that hypothetical $25k that a woman was earning? It seems to me like having $25k and some government benefits vs. $65k and no government benefits might just be enough to make it worthwhile? There is probably an econ paper in answering that question. Of course, one other thing is that as you go up the income ladder, your potential mates are probably smarter and more conscientious, i.e., better long term bets for a stable marriage as well.
Well, if only average to above average men can marry, at least half of all men are shit out of luck.
It’s also worth wondering if a man making above average money would want a woman making 25k. I don’t mean a woman who could make more money if she wanted too and chooses not to, but the kind of people who take menial jobs because that is the best they can do. They are likely not to have much going for them in general, not just in the workplace. We just seem to assume that middling men want low class women. Women have to be desirable as long term mates too.
It seems to me that what we’ve done is take the bottom half of the bell curve and replace a husband with the government because it creates loyal vote clients. The men who would be these women equals can’t equal Uncle Sam.
@asdf
It makes me wonder a lot about marriages in the past- poor people got married back then, right? Were those terrible marriages?
Also, as you pointed out, would those men who those women’s equals really want to marry those women? It seems like we have a culture or society that produces a whole lot of men and women who don’t make much money, and beyond that, are also pretty poor marriage material otherwise. It seems relatively straightforward to change things related to money as compared to people who are otherwise not suited to marriage.
Women want the top 10% of men (based on status/wealth)
Men want the top 10% of women (based on perceived reproductive fitness)
A “10” woman can compete for a 1% man. A “2” woman can’t. The “2” woman may be able to find a low-income/low-status man.
It gets more complicated, but basing the analysis on the averages obscures a lot. It’s a game theory problem, not an economic one. At least not entirely.
That’s probably true of a lot of cultural issues, now that I think about it. In a generally homogeneous population averages might…might sorta work. In a heterogeneous population you have to game theory out all the group interactions. When they invariably break down, you get social fraying, realignment (social unrest to civil war), then re-consolidation of a more stable framework. Which may or may not include all the same groups and the groups will certainly not have the same level of social power/capital as they did going into the realignment. Some will win and some lose.
Probably because in the modern world most people in their 20s have yet to completely accept their position in the economy. They still have hopes and dreams all the while having lots of failures. People in their twentites need to maximize their economic flexibilty before trying to create a stable family all the while maturing more. (And especially married with kids.) And historically speaking the lowest age of marriage in the US was early 1960s and I believe this one reason the divorce rate was at highest in the late 1970s.
So in the long run I believe the above couple at $12.50/hour do evidently marry but it be better at 30 as opposed to 22. (And yes better without kids before marriage and the couple has limited children. I would call this the Sanger/Singapore solution.) The concern of social conservatives are:
1) Birth rate continues to drop.
2) During late HS and college, people tend to move away from church going and return when their family starts. However the longer 16 – family is the less likely they return.
3) A lot twentysomthings fail. (And unlike the past, the age most people are failing life choices are 18 – 25 and not 14 – 18 like they did with the Boomer or even Gen X generations.) So we do remember the 1960 economy that people were settled, married, career, kids and house payments by 25.
“Probably because in the modern world most people in their 20s have yet to completely accept their position in the economy.”
Platonism and Hinduism are a hard sell for people in their 20s.
Because in their 20s, they think they have souls of gold. In their 30s, they finally accept their bronze fate. I like this line of thought.
What does this say about the modern world? That it’s a mirage? An artefact of youth?
People in their 30s don’t live in the modern world. They accept their position in the hierarchy. Maybe you were a modern man in your 20s. Then in your 30s you resign yourself to being a cashed-up peasant. You no longer believe in self-determination or autonomy or individualism. You accept the yoke of serfdom.
Woman with her degree in French poetry marries electrician.
I think there’s something to this. I seem to recall hearing a statistic that 55-60% of college students these days are women, so all else being equal you would expect to see marriages in which the woman is more highly educated.
I’d frame it the other way – wealthy men are more likely to marry less wealthy women if they are more educated. Or: less educated men who get rich will marry up in education.
It’s not necessarily the woman’s preferences that are driving this.
Dubious. Men are less discriminatory about marriage partners, in general, and to the extent they do discriminate, cup size is just as important as years of higher education.
Data? Anecdotally, the professional guys I know all have wives with above-average educational levels but not necessarily above-average bra sizes.
I guarantee that a significant, unmeasured variable that comes into play when women “marry down” the income/education/status scale is their looks.
You can have multiple PhD’s and a six figure plus income, but if you are too old, heavy/ugly, disagreeable, or some combination thereof, you are going to have to “marry down” or stay single.
After witnessing the disparity between officer’s wives and the wives of their enlisted counterparts, medicaid-heavy ERs rife with rail-thin males tethered to cosmologically obese females, etc, etc, etc, I am quite confided that you could use female BMI as a proxy for every salient social pathology under the sun because it so reliably co-varies with the status of the husbands.
I’m more interested in trends in the marriage equivalent to the BLS U6: people who would like to get married, but who aren’t or even can’t, and are either actively looking, discouraged, marginally attached, or who can’t receive a proposal or make one that will be accepted because of sexual market conditions (‘undermarriage’). One might also want to refine this measure for ‘tenure’ or stability of marriages given certain conditions, to distinguish the cases in which, on the one hand, everyone is married to one spouse for life, and on the other, everyone goes through a divorce but quickly gets remarried.
If, due to matching preferences, marriage matches tend to be more likely and more stable when there is a male-female social status gap (a combination which seems mostly to consist of earning power, career prestige, and educational credentials), then trends in the direction of educational, professional, and income parity will have a nasty trade off of tending to shut large populations out of happy, stable marriages, because tending to decrease many individuals’ pools of acceptable potential spouses.
What we observe is that in the discovery of a new social equilibrium, the margin of adjustment does not seem to be along the axis of these preferences, which a lot of ‘settling’ and ‘deals’ matching those with low desirability together. Instead, more and more people are just not getting married or forming traditional families.
This is one of the problems that affects black men and African American marriage rates. Because the men are less likely than the women are to have stable jobs, more likely to have prison records, etc., that makes black males less desirable as marriage partners. So the black women will tend to try to keep their options open and not marry the fathers of their children.
I recall a few years back OkCupid did a study on this with their user data. Apparently being a black male is around an automatic 30% discount in desirability based on the statistical data they gathered.
While it seems there’s a lot about the marriage market for college educated women, there’s not so much about the non-coed women.
The trends in marriage for non-coeds, and especially the increasing number of kids born to women whose “breadwinner” is Uncle Sugar, that is what we need to understand more of. The culture of poverty crisis is mostly the women, kids, and absent/non-married fathers where policies, if any, should be directed.
There should be lots more gov’t support / rewards, for helping those who are married, with kids, to more rapidly “get ahead” — meaning the gov’t should give them tax reductions / tax credits so that they can move to better places and, by being married with kids, provide an social/cultural improvement in those areas.
The failure to note age differences seems a small weakness in the first pages of the study; the failure to note physical attractiveness is a bigger weakness. Some of the cited reference papers phrase decisions as if it’s the men choosing or not, men “still appear to hesitate to choose women whose status exceeds their own status” .
I’m pretty sure lots of men ask out women of “higher status”, but the hook-ups (? if any?) don’t become relationships due to a lack of mutual desire. I’m pretty sure it’s as much or more the hypergamy of the women than status-inferiority of the men, but this paper doesn’t challenge the claim of the referred to paper.
The 93% difference statistic is worse than 1% to 2%, or 10% to 19.3%; or 30% to 68%; or whatever the two statistics being compared is. 30 to 68 is a lot more impressive than 1 to 2.
I see nothing about taller men / shorter women, but that remains one of the strongest gender normal behaviors, where the shorter women literally look up to their men.
Thanks @handle for a link, tho my anti-spam was in Russian (or some Cyrillic).