Injustice Why Social Inequality Persists by Daniel Dorling

Injustice Why Social Inequality Persists by Daniel Dorling

Author:Daniel Dorling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Injustice Why Social Inequality Persists
ISBN: 9781447300298
Publisher: The Policy Press
Published: 2011-04-04T16:00:00+00:00


Assortative mating

The story from the late 1970s onwards is again one of assortative mating becoming popular in times of rising inequality, but it is now no longer simply about the sharing of the family treasures, the counting up and weighing of the silver candlesticks before getting into bed. This assortative mating was a little more about marrying people with similar occupational incomes. From the early 1970s more and more women were permitted to hold jobs that did not pay a pittance, and to keep working after marriage. Looks and freedom began to matter less and less, even for the poorest; what mattered more and more was class.57

From the late 1970s onwards actual salaries at the top end began to diverge upwards rapidly. Warped morals also began to be countenanced again in countries like Britain, morals that suggested that competition was good, cooperation bad, just a few were truly talented and they should have their talents supposedly ‘justly rewarded’. If you began to believe that, you became more careful who you slept with. It was not just that the lives of the rich became more separated from the poor, but that the implications of mixing became more daunting. Slowly at first, and then more quickly, the highest paid became even more highly paid. Dual-income higher-earner households moved away from all other household types most quickly. Income inequalities rose, and as they rose the idea of mixing socially with those a little less well-off became just a little less palatable with every year that passed; there was literally more, in terms of money, to lose by a ‘bad marriage’. This reached such an extent in the US that by 2007 young people from affluent families were being told that on early dates they should be clear and say: ‘There’s something important I need to share with you. In my family we do prenups’.58 It is difficult to think of a phrase, other than ‘I have herpes, would you like to share?’, as off-putting as ‘in my family we do prenups’.59 Rates of mixing by marriage fell in the more unequal of countries from the 1970s onwards.

In the US those falls in social mixing resulted in a slowing down of the rise in the number of inter-racial marriages, although these were still rising as they had been since slavery. Until recently white and black couples were rarely shown on television in the US, and it is partly low rates of inter-racial marriages that maintain such high poverty levels among black Americans. In the US having great-great-grandparents who were in slavery is the legacy singlehandedly most likely to result in low financial inheritance, because of the legacy of slavery, and of laws and then traditions designed to prevent non-assortative mating between what were seen as separate races (miscegenation). This has resulted in both the huge extent of inequalities in wealth found in the US and the great reluctance of even those who own just a little wealth to work cooperatively and to sociably invest in the common good.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.