Saturday, July 21, 2012

Unequal Behavior Drives Inequality

But striking changes in family structure have also broadened income gaps and posed new barriers to upward mobility. College-educated Americans like the Faulkners are increasingly likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay. Less-educated women like Ms. Schairer, who left college without finishing her degree, are growing less likely to marry at all, raising children on pinched paychecks that come in ones, not twos.


Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns - as opposed to changes in individual earnings - may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-divided-by-i-do.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Inequality - a justification for tyranny if I've ever seen one.  Who doesn't already know that people who make better choices, have more choices?

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