No Mercy / No Malice: Marrying Up and Marrying Down

Support for Prop G comes from Saks Fifth Avenue.

Saks.com is personalized, which makes shopping much easier. Let's say there's a Burberry jacket I like.
Now Saks.com can show me the best Burberry jackets and similar styles from brands I probably didn't have on my radar to begin with. Saks.com will even let you know when the Prada loafers you've been eyeing are back in stock or when new vacation shirts from Casablanca are in.
Who doesn't like easy, personalized shopping that saves you time? Head over to Saks.com. Craft is where function meets style.
It's where precision meets performance. It's where doing it yourself meets showing the world what you're capable of.
The all-new Acura ADX is a compact SUV crafted to take you where you need to go, without any compromises.

With available Google built-in, all-wheel drive, and a 15-speaker bang and all-of-some premium sound system,

the all-new ADX is crafted to be as alive to the world's possibilities as you are.

The all-new ADX, crafted to match your energy.

Acura, precision crafted performance. Learn more at acura.com.
At UC San Diego, research isn't just about asking big questions. It saves lives and fuels innovation, like predicting storms from space, teaching T-cells to attack cancer, and eliminating cybersecurity threats with AI.
As one of America's leading research universities, they are putting big ideas to work in new and novel ways. At UC San Diego, research moves the world forward.
Learn more at ucsd.edu slash research. I'm Scott Galloway and and this is No Mercy, No Malice.

What's the new luxury item?

Marriage.

Marrying up and marrying down, as read by George Hahn. 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's an even bigger gender gap in master's degrees.
Does this matter? 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. 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.
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 Winkleman, 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.
The decline in marriage rates has been among women without a BA. As a result, a huge class gap in marriage has opened up.
As the authors of the study write for AIBM, quote, the stable marriage outcomes for college-educated women sharply contrast with the significant decline in marriage rates among women without a BA over the past half century. Among women born in 1930, there was no education gap in marriage rates.
Since then, a nearly 20 percentage point gap has emerged, with college-educated women now significantly more likely to marry. Unquote.
The simple math here means that some women with college degrees must be marrying men without college degrees. That is exactly what the paper finds.
One in five college-educated women marry a man without a four-year degree. What's more surprising is that this was always the case, long before the great

educational overtaking. College-educated women born in 1950 were as likely as those born in 1980 to marry a man without a degree.
Women with college degrees continue to marry at high rates in part because of the continued willingness among one-fifth of them to marry down in terms of education. This suggests that a combination of female hypergamy and a growing gender gap in education is not having a negative impact on marriage rates.
Of course, there are still many unanswered questions. Maybe some of the 30% of those women with a BA but no wedding ring would be more inclined to marry if there were more college-educated men around.
The stability of the marriage trend suggests not, however. It looks like they just don't want to marry, period.
In the most interesting couples, from a cultural perspective, the wife has more education than the husband. At first glance, that bucks the whole idea of hypergamy.
But, of course, education is only one marker of marriage ability and status. It turns out that money matters a lot too.
Men who have a college-educated wife, even though they don't have a BA themselves, in other words, men who've married up in educational terms, make a lot more money than other guys with similar levels of education. Among those born in 1980, guys who married up make $68,000 a year compared to the $46,000 a year earned by men who either married a woman without a degree or didn't marry at all.
The earnings premium among men who marry up educationally has gotten bigger over time. This shows that women with a degree are willing to marry men without one, so long as they're making decent money.
Women might marry down in terms of education, but not in terms of earnings. The good news here is that economically viable men have decent marriage prospects, and that women with degrees can find a good man.
The bad news is that men doing badly in the labor market

are likely to struggle in the marriage market, too.

The paper finds that in areas where working-class men are doing better,

marriage rates go up, cutting the marital class gap in half.

Making men more economically viable, to use one of Scott's favorite terms,

turns out to be the key to improving marital prospects. There's a corrosive downward spiral at work right now.
As the economic prospects of men without a college degree decline, marriage rates fall. That leaves millions more men and women without a partner to share the responsibilities and benefits of family life.
In other work by AIBM, we show that half of men without a college degree

aged 30 to 50 now live in a household without children. Without the positive pressures that

come from being a father and husband, men are even less likely to really go for it on the work front.

They are more likely to be unemployed.

They become more vulnerable to addiction, more socially isolated, all of which makes them less attractive as potential spouses.

Boys raised in single-mother households then struggle in school and in life, and they have difficulty finding a mate and forming a family too and so the cycle turns the economic struggles of boys and men become entrenched across generations it's not often enough stressed that the class gap in marriage is not only a consequence of economic inequality, but also a cause of it. Pooling incomes into a single household is obviously optimal, but from an economic perspective, especially for those with the lowest incomes, who are now the least likely to marry.
Some scholars suggest that the class gap in marriage can explain much of the decline in social mobility in recent decades. Concerns about marriage should then be focused on men and women with less educational attainment and or worsening economic outcomes.
The problem is not that your daughter graduating from Amherst or Berkeley won't

find a man good enough for her. The problem is that a woman in Appalachia or the Bronx

won't find a man she sees as worth marrying. The best pro-marriage anti-poverty strategy

is simple. Improve the economic prospects of working class and lower income men.
Simple does not mean easy, of course. Massive investments in education and training are required, as well as more spending on infrastructure, place-based policies to help the poorest counties, and much more besides.
But it's clear where to start with the boys and men. Life is so rich.
Support for this show comes from Upway. Stuck in traffic again? Frustrated with rising gas prices? There's a better way to get around.
Commuting by e-bike can be better for your health, your schedule, and your wallet. Here's my tip.
Go to upway.co to find e-bikes from top-tier brands like Specialized, Cannondale, and Aventon at up to 60% off retail. Get $150 off your first e-bike purchase of $1,000 or more with code PODCAST150.
And enjoy free delivery across California. You can thank me later.
It's been reported that one in four people experience sensory sensitivities, making everyday experiences like a trip to the dentist especially difficult. In fact, 26% of sensory-sensitive individuals avoid dental visits entirely.
In Sensory Overload, a new documentary produced as part of Sensodyne's Sensory Inclusion Initiative, we follow individuals navigating a world not built for them, where bright lights, loud sounds, and unexpected touches can turn routine moments into overwhelming challenges. Burnett Grant, for example, has spent their life masking discomfort in workplaces that don't accommodate neurodivergence.
I've only had two full-time jobs where I felt safe, they share. This is why they're advocating for change.
Through deeply personal stories like Burnett's, Sensory Overload highlights the urgent need for spaces, dental offices, and beyond that embrace sensory inclusion. Because true inclusion requires action with environments where everyone feels safe.
Watch Sensory Overload now, streaming on Hulu. You're a problem solver.
You've never met a recipe that didn't need a tasty substitution or a room that couldn't use some rearranging. When it comes to keeping your floors clean, the solution is simple.
The next generation

of Roomba robots. The Roomba 205 Combo and Roomba Plus 405 Combo use a four-stage cleaning system

for thoroughly clean floors. Roomba robots work so that you can think about more important things,

like the perfect spot for that new ottoman. Roomba robots were made for this.
Learn more at

iRobot.com.

That's I-R-O-B-O-T dot com.