No Mercy / No Malice: Marrying Up and Marrying Down

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The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway 11 min 4 speakers 5 chapters transcribed
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What is the main topic of this episode?

Sky Galloway 1:04
I'm Sky Galloway and this is No Mercy, No Malice. What's the new luxury item? Marriage. Marrying Up and Marrying Down, as read by George Hahn.

Why are college campuses seeing a gender shift?

George Hahn 1:49
This post was written by Richard Reeves. A dramatic reversal has taken place on college campuses. Once male-dominated, they are now populated largely by women. In the early 1970s, about three in five students were men. Now it is the other way around. There are 2.5 million fewer male than female undergraduates. There is an even bigger gender gap in master's degrees. Does this matter?

How does the gender education gap affect the labor market?

George Hahn 2:20
After all, the massive educational advance of women and girls is rightly seen as a cause for celebration rather than lamentation. Given that men still out-earn women, there's an argument to be made that women need to out-learn men, just to keep up in the labor market. I think it does matter. For one thing, it highlights how the K-12 educational system fails boys. Kudos to those governors like Wes Moore in Maryland and Spencer Cox in Utah, who have noticed. Even when men do enroll in college, they're much less likely to get a degree. Too much male talent is being left on the table. This is why 30 or so institutions have already joined a new initiative I'm helping lead. The Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative.

Does the college gender gap impact marriage rates?

George Hahn 3:13
But there is one thing we can stop worrying about. That the college gender gap is reducing marriage rates. This is a common concern and for good reason. There is pretty strong evidence for what anthropologists call female hypergamy, which is a fancy way of saying that women typically want to marry men of at least equal or preferably higher status. The fear is that with so many more college educated women than men, marriage rates will plummet. I've always been skeptical of this argument. For one thing, women overtook men in higher education back in the 1980s. So if marriage rates among women with a college degree were going to fall, they'd have done so by now, and they haven't.

What are the findings of the study on marriage and hypergamy?

George Hahn 3:59
There is also some evidence from European countries that hypergamy declines as gender equality increases. Because this is an empirical question, I commissioned an empirical study. The resulting paper, by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman and Joseph Winkelmann, uses data from Opportunity Insights, a team of researchers and policy analysts at Harvard, led by economist Raj Chetty. Marriage rates among college-educated women have been rock steady at around 70% for decades, at least since World War II. As the authors of the study write for AIBM, quote, Unquote. Das einfache Mathematik bedeutet, dass einige Frauen mit Hochschulabschlägen Männer ohne Hochschulabschläge verheiraten müssen. Das ist genau das, was das Buch findet.
George Hahn 5:33
Eine in fünf hochschulabschlänglichen Frauen verheiraten einen Mann ohne vierjähriges Abstand. Was mehr überraschend ist, ist, dass dies immer der Fall war, lange bevor das große Bildungsübertragung. College-educated women born in 1950 were as likely as those born in 1980 to marry a man without a degree.

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