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0:01:06 I’m Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice.
0:01:08 What’s the new luxury item?
0:01:10 Marriage.
0:01:13 Marrying up and marrying down, as read by George Hahn.
0:01:30 This post was written by Richard Reeves.
0:01:35 A dramatic reversal has taken place on college campuses.
0:01:39 Once male dominated, they are now populated largely by women.
0:01:44 In the early 1970s, about three in five students were men.
0:01:47 Now it is the other way around.
0:01:52 There are 2.5 million fewer male than female undergraduates.
0:01:55 There’s an even bigger gender gap in master’s degrees.
0:01:57 Does this matter?
0:02:01 After all, the massive educational advance of women and girls
0:02:06 is rightly seen as a cause for celebration rather than lamentation.
0:02:09 Given that men still out-earn women,
0:02:13 there’s an argument to be made that women need to out-learn men,
0:02:16 just to keep up in the labor market.
0:02:18 I think it does matter.
0:02:24 For one thing, it highlights how the K-12 educational system fails boys.
0:02:27 Kudos to those governors like Wes Moore in Maryland
0:02:30 and Spencer Cox in Utah, who have noticed.
0:02:32 Even when men do enroll in college,
0:02:36 they’re much less likely to get a degree.
0:02:39 Too much male talent is being left on the table.
0:02:42 This is why 30 or so institutions
0:02:46 have already joined a new initiative I’m helping lead,
0:02:50 the Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative.
0:02:53 But there is one thing we can stop worrying about,
0:02:58 that the college gender gap is reducing marriage rates.
0:03:02 This is a common concern and for good reason.
0:03:04 There is pretty strong evidence
0:03:08 for what anthropologists call female hypergamy,
0:03:12 which is a fancy way of saying that women typically want to marry men
0:03:15 of at least equal or preferably higher status.
0:03:20 The fear is that with so many more college-educated women than men,
0:03:23 marriage rates will plummet.
0:03:25 I’ve always been skeptical of this argument.
0:03:30 For one thing, women overtook men in higher education back in the 1980s.
0:03:34 So if marriage rates among women with a college degree were going to fall,
0:03:37 they’d have done so by now and they haven’t.
0:03:39 There is also some evidence from European countries
0:03:45 that hypergamy declines as gender equality increases.
0:03:47 Because this is an empirical question,
0:03:50 I commissioned an empirical study.
0:03:55 The resulting paper by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelman
0:03:59 uses data from Opportunity Insights,
0:04:02 a team of researchers and policy analysts at Harvard,
0:04:06 led by economist Raj Chetty.
0:04:10 Marriage rates among college-educated women have been rock-steady
0:04:16 at around 70% for decades, at least since World War II.
0:04:21 The decline in marriage rates has been among women without a BA.
0:04:26 As a result, a huge class gap in marriage has opened up.
0:04:30 As the authors of the study write for AIBM,
0:04:34 “The stable marriage outcomes for college-educated women
0:04:38 sharply contrast with the significant decline in marriage rates
0:04:43 among women without a BA over the past half century.
0:04:48 Among women born in 1930, there was no education gap in marriage rates.
0:04:52 Since then, a nearly 20 percentage point gap has emerged
0:04:59 with college-educated women now significantly more likely to marry.”
0:05:03 The simple math here means that some women with college degrees
0:05:07 must be marrying men without college degrees.
0:05:11 That is exactly what the paper finds.
0:05:17 One in five college-educated women marry a man without a four-year degree.
0:05:21 What’s more surprising is that this was always the case,
0:05:24 long before the great educational overtaking.
0:05:31 College-educated women born in 1950 were as likely as those born in 1980
0:05:35 to marry a man without a degree.
0:05:39 Women with college degrees continue to marry at high rates,
0:05:43 in part because of the continued willingness among one-fifth of them
0:05:47 to marry down in terms of education.
0:05:50 This suggests that a combination of female hypergamy
0:05:53 and a growing gender gap in education
0:05:57 is not having a negative impact on marriage rates.
0:06:00 Of course, there are still many unanswered questions.
0:06:04 Maybe some of the 30 percent of those women with a BA
0:06:07 but no wedding ring would be more inclined to marry
0:06:10 if there were more college-educated men around.
0:06:14 The stability of the marriage trend suggests not, however.
0:06:17 It looks like they just don’t want to marry, period.
0:06:20 In the most interesting couples from a cultural perspective,
0:06:24 the wife has more education than the husband.
0:06:28 At first glance, that bucks the whole idea of hypergamy.
0:06:34 But, of course, education is only one marker of marriageability and status.
0:06:37 It turns out that money matters a lot, too.
0:06:40 Men who have a college-educated wife,
0:06:42 even though they don’t have a BA themselves,
0:06:45 in other words, men who’ve married up in educational terms,
0:06:50 make a lot more money than other guys with similar levels of education.
0:06:58 Among those born in 1980, guys who married up make $68,000 a year
0:07:01 compared to the $46,000 a year earned by men
0:07:06 who either married a woman without a degree or didn’t marry at all.
0:07:10 The earnings premium among men who marry up educationally
0:07:13 has gotten bigger over time.
0:07:17 This shows that women with a degree are willing to marry men without one
0:07:21 so long as they’re making decent money.
0:07:25 Women might marry down in terms of education,
0:07:28 but not in terms of earnings.
0:07:34 The good news here is that economically viable men have decent marriage prospects
0:07:38 and that women with degrees can find a good man.
0:07:42 The bad news is that men doing badly in the labor market
0:07:46 are likely to struggle in the marriage market, too.
0:07:50 The paper finds that in areas where working-class men are doing better,
0:07:55 marriage rates go up, cutting the marital class gap in half,
0:08:00 making men more economically viable to use one of Scott’s favorite terms,
0:08:05 turns out to be the key to improving marital prospects.
0:08:10 There’s a corrosive downward spiral at work right now.
0:08:15 As the economic prospects of men without a college degree decline,
0:08:17 marriage rates fall.
0:08:21 That leaves millions more men and women without a partner to share the
0:08:25 responsibilities and benefits of family life.
0:08:31 In other work by AIBM, we show that half of men without a college degree,
0:08:37 aged 30 to 50, now live in a household without children.
0:08:41 Without the positive pressures that come from being a father and husband,
0:08:46 men are even less likely to really go for it on the work front.
0:08:50 They are more likely to be unemployed. They become more vulnerable to addiction,
0:08:55 more socially isolated, all of which makes them less attractive as potential
0:08:59 spouses. Boys raised in single-mother households
0:09:04 then struggle in school and in life, and they have difficulty finding a mate
0:09:09 and forming a family, too. And so the cycle turns.
0:09:12 The economic struggles of boys and men become entrenched
0:09:15 across generations.
0:09:20 It’s not often enough stressed that the class gap in marriage
0:09:23 is not only a consequence of economic inequality,
0:09:29 but also a cause of it. Pooling incomes into a single household is
0:09:32 obviously optimal, but from an economic perspective,
0:09:37 especially for those with the lowest incomes, who are now the least likely to
0:09:41 marry. Some scholars suggest that the class
0:09:46 gap in marriage can explain much of the decline in social mobility in recent
0:09:50 decades. Concerns about marriage should then be
0:09:55 focused on men and women with less educational attainment and/or
0:10:00 worsening economic outcomes. The problem is not that your daughter
0:10:05 graduating from Amherst or Berkeley won’t find a man good enough for her.
0:10:08 The problem is that a woman in Appalachia or the Bronx
0:10:13 won’t find a man she sees as worth marrying.
0:10:17 The best pro-marriage anti-poverty strategy
0:10:23 is simple. Improve the economic prospects of working class and lower
0:10:29 income men. Simple does not mean easy, of course.
0:10:32 Massive investments in education and training are required,
0:10:36 as well as more spending on infrastructure, place-based policies to
0:10:40 help the poorest counties, and much more besides.
0:10:45 But it’s clear where to start with the boys
0:10:48 and men.
0:10:58 Life is so rich.
0:11:07 All right, Sean, you can do this promo talking about all the great
0:11:12 box media podcasts that are going to be on stage live at South by Southwest this
0:11:17 March. You just need a big idea to get people’s attention, to help them,
0:11:20 you know, keep them from hitting the skip button.
0:11:24 I don’t know. I’m going to throw it out to the group chat. Kara, do you have any
0:11:26 ideas? In these challenging times, we’re a group of
0:11:30 mighty hosts who have banded together to fight disinformation by speaking
0:11:35 truth to power, like the Avengers, but with more spandex. What do you think, Scott?
0:11:39 I’m more of an X-man fan myself. I call me professor.
0:11:43 Can I read minds? I can’t really read minds, but I can empathize
0:11:47 with anyone having a mid-life crisis, which is essentially any tech leader so.
0:11:51 Mines are important, Scott, but we’re more than that.
0:11:56 I think that you can’t really separate minds from feelings,
0:12:00 and we need to talk about our emotions and explore the layers of our
0:12:04 relationships with our partners, co-workers, our families,
0:12:08 neighbors, and our adjacent communities. I just want to add a touch more.
0:12:12 From sports and culture to tech and politics, Vox Media has an All-Star lineup
0:12:16 of podcasts that’s great in your feeds, but even better live.
0:12:23 That’s it! All-Stars! Get your game on, go, play, come see a bunch of Vox Media
0:12:27 All-Stars, and also me at South by Southwest on the Vox Media
0:12:31 podcast stage presented by Smartsheet and Intuit.
0:12:38 March 8th through 10th in Austin, Texas. Go to voxmedia.com/sxsw.
0:12:45 You’ll never know if you don’t go. You’ll never shine if you don’t glow.