Ruth Marcus’s Friday column in the Washington Post makes the smart point that the income gap, which liberals love to bemoan, is to a very large extent a marriage gap. Lower-income people aren’t marrying nearly as often as higher-income people or, to put it another way, income disparities are to a large extent the result of decisions people make in their personal lives.
Noting that current trends indicate that soon half the adult population will be unmarried, Marcus writes, “Is marriage a magic button solution to the broader problem of income inequality and [relative] lack of income mobility? No, but fewer marriages will mean more inequality.”
Contributing significantly to income inequality is assortative mating — that is, the tendency of high-education people to marry other high-education people. The result is two-earner households who, according to Marcus’s quote from the Brookings Institution’s Isabel Sawhill, “are just making out like bandits.”
An unfortunate phrase, for I am sure that Sawhill, a careful and thoughtful scholar, doesn’t mean to imply that these people are doing anything illegal.
