A VIRTUOUS SPIRAL.

Microeconomic Insights, "Marital choices and widening economic inequality."  First, assortative mating exists.

To test our theory, we drew on census data and social surveys. We focused on men born between 1940 and 1967 and women born between 1941 and 1968. We examined trends in education, marriage rates, spousal choices and how parents spend their nonworking hours.

As predicted, we found an increasing tendency of people to select spouses of comparable educational calibre, which we attribute in part to their desire to raise high-achieving children. Those children, in turn, are more likely to marry educated partners – thus propelling a spiral of educational and, consequently, income inequality.

Second, life-management skills matter.

From a broader perspective, our findings raise serious concerns about increased inequality over the coming decades. Research by Jim Heckman and coauthors (see, e.g., Heckman and Mosso, 2014) has found that human capital formation involves not just the child’s innate ability and formal schooling, but also parental involvement. Further, these factors tend, at least after early childhood, to become dynamic complements: a larger stock of one factor tends to increase the marginal productivity of the others. As individuals with high levels of human capital marry each other and invest heavily in their children’s human capital, the gap between these children and those born in less educated families will widen, setting the stage for even more inequality in human capital – and even more diverging marital and investement patterns – for the next generation.

Such a trend in human capital reproduction portends reduced social mobility. To head off this scenario, society’s best hope may be in finding ways to intervene early in children’s lives − before the effects of inequalities among families solidify.

Perhaps, just perhaps, our Deep Thinkers will consider the social damage that comes from enabling the bad habits that contribute to less human and social capital in the first place.