Tuesday, October 1, 2013
From The Atlantic: "How America's Marriage Crisis Makes Income Inequality So Much Worse"
This will hardly be news to readers interested in the subject matter and concerns of this blog. But it's important to see it emphasized again in a venue like The Atlantic (which indeed first published Charles Murray's earlier findings on it).
In a strange twist, marriage has recently become a capstone for the privileged class. The decline of marriage, to the extent that we're seeing it, is happening almost exclusively among the poor. . . .
The marriage inequality crisis creates a virtuous cycle at the top and a vicious one at the bottom. It pushes educated and non-educated Americans into entirely different worlds. . . .
This is the marriage crisis behind our inequality crisis. It is not complicated. It requires no regressions. It is the simplest math equation is the world. It says: Two is more than one.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2013/10/from-the-atlantic-how-americas-marriage-crisis-makes-income-inequality-so-much-worse-.html
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It is part of the story, but not the whole story, which is important to keep in mind since such arguments can be used by some to dismiss concerns about rising inequality with a simple reduction of the problem to one of marriage. There is a gap between married and non-married incomes, but inequality is a much larger phenomenon as well. So, for example, the gap between the married rich and the married non-rich has been growing at the same rate as other inequality gaps (isolating variables shows why regression is actually a pretty useful tool in analyzing complex economic and social trends). In a strange way, marriage trends explain poverty more than inequality (the two are not the same). Inequality also involves deindustrialization, the political dismantling of unions, immigration, tax and spending policy, etc.