
The Real Reason Richer People Marry - prostoalex
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-richer-people-marry.html?gwh=5E4DCFA873DEAA75E54E33A50662A613&gwt=pay&assetType=opinion
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ars
This sentence makes no sense:

"Unlike their ancestors in the late 1800s, many of today’s working-class young
adults have responded to the difficulty of marrying by living with a partner
and having children outside of marriage."

What difficulty in marrying? I could understand a difficulty in living
together and having kids. But marrying? That's just a piece of paper. It makes
little difference for people who already have a family together.

I think that people simply don't value that paper - it means little to them
except maybe an expense for a large party.

Any analysis of marriage rates should consider people who cohabitatate to be
married for the purpose of understanding family trends.

~~~
wheaties
Or watching your loved one's paycheck be taxed higher because they married you
(high income households.) See that they no longer are eligible for certain
government programs that they depended on because your combined incomes are
just high enough (lower incomes.) Certain low income homes we looked when I
was younger looked at households income. No surprise that there were mostly
single mothers who lived there.

~~~
sliverstorm
_Or watching your loved one 's paycheck be taxed higher because they married
you_

I'm pretty sure that's not normally how it works. Married couples have the
same deduction (well, it's doubled, but they file only one return) and tax
rates on a couple are lower:

    
    
        Income between 40,000 - 40,050
        Tax if filing single: 5,935
        Tax if married filing jointly: 5,111
    
        Income between 80,000 - 80,050
        Tax if filing single: 15,935
        Tax if married filing jointly: 11,864
    

[http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040tt.pdf](http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-
pdf/i1040tt.pdf)

Please notice that two single people making $40k each pay $5,935, while one
married couple making $80k pays $11,864.

    
    
        $5,935 * 2 = $11,870
    

As for no longer qualifying for low-income grants or programs, most of those
take marital status into consideration much like the standard deduction- a
family making $10,000 is going to qualify for a lot more than a single person
making $10,000

~~~
TheCoelacanth
It's actually kind of complicated whether there are benefits or drawbacks to
being married. For couples where most of the income comes from one person,
there are benefits. For couples with roughly equal incomes, there is a
marriage penalty for couples with very high (because the upper tax brackets
start at less than twice of the corresponding single tax brackets) or very low
(because of EITC) income.

Here a chart that depicts how the effect of marriage on taxes varies with
income: [http://taxfoundation.org/article/effects-marriage-tax-
burden...](http://taxfoundation.org/article/effects-marriage-tax-burden-vary-
greatly-income-level-equality)

------
jemfinch
I read that entire article and I still don't understand the real reason richer
people marry.

~~~
xercex
Simple:

1) Richer people are mostly smarter. Smarter people see through the toxic
culture and seek to marry.

2) Wealthy people are often so because they do things that help build wealth
and success, Ie. marriage. Smart people descended from smart married people
are more likely to follow their parents warnings about the destructiveness of
the toxic culture which attacks marriage.

~~~
cageface
Did you even read the article?

 _But some digging into historical census records shows that social class
differences in marriage have been tied to the extent of income inequality
among white Americans for at least 130 years. They also suggest that
commentators who insist that the marriage gap is wholly a matter of values are
almost surely wrong._

~~~
xercex
The article is purposely misleading. At best its entire premise is concluded
on one small report that only looks at one source of data. Even the article
admits: "To be sure, the parallel movements of economic inequality and
marriage inequality do not prove that the former causes the latter."

The truth is that there was some correlation always - that makes sense with
what I said, which is smarter people are going to do smarter things like marry
and make more money - but the extreme difference is today, not 130 years ago.
This extreme and growing difference is due to the toxic culture being
promoted.

~~~
cageface
The funny this that I would agree to you that, at least to some extent,
popular culture is part of the problem. But I think you're going to have to
back up that argument with some hard data to make it sound like something more
than another predictable culture war salvo.

------
clay_to_n
Not the most well-written article for NYT, but interesting point and good
visual. I think the "real reason" according to the author is simply that they
have more money (as opposed to having better morals, culture, or whatever). It
makes sense that marriage is unattractive if you're a working class male who
doesn't think he could support a family.

------
michaelochurch
Different explanation, and some of this ain't pretty. (Apologies if this is
male-centric, but it's probably quite similar for women.)

Richer people (or, at least, socioeconomically comfortable people) establish
masculinity and effectiveness by building successful families. If you're happy
at work and your kids are doing great and you're intellectually engaged, one
woman is enough for most men. That obscene sex drive of the 17-year-old (that,
if it could be realized at that age, would be horrific) is long gone. At 30
with a decent socioeconomic life, you can be satisfied with one woman as long
as she's basically good to you, because you're _happy_ and don't need sexual
variety.

For some men, this isn't an option. It might be a lack of long-term, decent
employment. It might be a family situation that he can't extricate himself
from. Or, he might be externally successful and have "the perfect life" from a
distance but be ridiculously insecure. Most men who cheat are horribly
insecure (which may explain their tendency to "cheat down"). I hate the
stud/slut dichotomy because (a) it seems to equate insecurity with moral
weakness (and while sexual _immorality_ is revolting, promiscuity isn't
necessarily immoral, even if unwise for most people) and (b) the truth is that
most promiscuous men are just as insecure as promiscuous women, so there's no
justification for the differential perception of male as victor and female as
conquered.

If you want to go deeper into the theory behind this, humans actually have
_two_ sex drives, one geared toward r-selection and the other toward
K-selection. Stereotypically, the r-drive is stronger in the young (15-25) and
male; the K-drive starts to dominate at age 18-20 for women and 25-30 for men.
The K-drive is the "work hard, build a nest, find one partner you really like,
maybe start a family" sexual drive. But if it's frustrated due to
socioeconomic insecurity, people are more willing to let themselves be
distracted by the promiscuous r-drive. This can be OK if it's all consensual
and no one's being cheated on... but if it's furtive and dishonest, it's
awful.

This isn't about a difference in values between social classes. I don't think
that there is one. The (small) upper class is its own beast and assessing it
would take time from what I'm trying to say... but the _truth_ about family
values is that, from lower to upper-middle class, and in all racial and
religious categories, and even between straights and gays these days...
there's much more variation within categories than between them. The marriage
gap isn't about a discrepancy in _values_ or "morality" (if that even applies,
and I'm not convinced that it should) but in _behavior_. We aren't more moral
than the people in the ghettos. We just behave differently because we're under
a different and mostly less severe set of stressors.

Plenty of people associate wealth with the opportunity toward promiscuity
("two chicks at the same time") but the empirical facts are that (a)
promiscuity hardly requires money, social skills and tactics ("Game") being
more important, and (b) most people who are socioeconomically comfortable have
little interest in promiscuity after age 25.

Comfortable people (a better adjective than "rich", because some objectively
rich people are financially reckless, uncomfortable, and miserable) are more
likely to marry because, with a low level of stress, most people are
influenced much more strongly by the K-selective sex drive after age 25 (if
not earlier).

~~~
apsec112
"If you want to go deeper into the theory behind this, humans actually have
two sex drives, one geared toward r-selection and the other toward
K-selection."

Human sexuality is very complex, and has had evolutionary pressure on it from
many different directions... but that's not how the science works. I'll let
Slate Star Codex explain ([http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/20/ozys-anti-
heartiste-faq...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/20/ozys-anti-heartiste-
faq/)):

"Is it true that some humans are r-selected, which means they’re promiscuous
and want to have lots of children, and some humans are k-selected, which means
they invest in a few children?

No.

For one thing, r/k selection theory was shown to be a vast oversimplification
of life-history evolution forty years ago. For another thing, it applies on a
species level, not on an individual level. Humans as a species are absurdly
k-selected. How many species can you think of that have young that are totally
helpless for their first decade of life? r/k selection theory would argue that
we wouldn’t have casual sex, because humans are not remotely r-selected on any
conceivable level! Clearly, this is not the case, which ought to make one
wonder how applicable this is to human beings anyway."

Here is a paper going into the details of the science:
[http://www2.hawaii.edu/~taylor/z652/Reznicketal.pdf](http://www2.hawaii.edu/~taylor/z652/Reznicketal.pdf)

~~~
michaelochurch
_Is it true that some humans are r-selected, which means they’re promiscuous
and want to have lots of children, and some humans are k-selected, which means
they invest in a few children?_

This is not what I'm saying. If you look at any human's ancestry, you're going
to find both influences. The last thing I intend to say is that there are
meaningful differences _between_ humans (either at an individual or group
level) on this front. My point is that both sex drives exist, because both are
a part of our evolutionary story.

 _Humans as a species are absurdly k-selected. How many species can you think
of that have young that are totally helpless for their first decade of life? r
/k selection theory would argue that we wouldn’t have casual sex, because
humans are not remotely r-selected on any conceivable level!_

My argument is that all humans are both, each to some degree, although the
K-drive is more socially acceptable, civilized, and progressive... and
probably the stronger one in most of us.

Being r-selective is actually very adaptive during times of ecological stress,
such as after a population crash. K-selection is more fruitful when population
is at saturation and the only available growth is civilization's progress. I
don't intend to moralize on this. We needed both drives to get us where we
are. You're right that, as applies to any specific animal, the r/K selection
theory is a bit simplistic because almost all advanced organisms exhibit
traits derived from both evolutionary imperatives (quality and quantity). For
example, trees are K-selective in terms of being durable and large, but
r-selective in terms of having many seeds.

As for "we wouldn't have casual sex", I'm not so sure that there's an
either/or. Humans are an advanced animal and, given both our cognitive
capability (and flexibility) and our numbers, it's quite reasonable to assume
that human behavior includes the full spectrum of strategies. It's not
unreasonable to suppose that humans are predisposed to r-selective behavior
when young (15-25) and K-driven behavior when older (25+).

