Upper class people are not getting married to lower class people.

From Response to Douthat on Two-Parent Families by Matt Bruenig.  He makes a good point which I had not considered and which is germane in terms of policy considerations.  He is discussing marriage, class and income/well-being.  Read the whole thing but the gist is this.

Regarding Douthat’s marriage point here, he makes a mistake that nearly everyone in this discourse makes and it’s kind of driving me crazy over time. The mistake is saying that, contrary to lower class people, upper class people are getting married. The reason this is a mistake is that upper class people are not getting married to lower class people.

If we follow Douthat’s recommendation to look at the behavior of upper class people to determine what kinds of behavior are privilege-enhancing, then we are forced to conclude that marrying an upper class spouse is privilege-enhancing while marrying a lower class spouse is not and should be avoided. That’s how upper class people actually behave. Right?

Another common and pithy way of expressing Douthat’s point here is that upper class people should “preach what they practice,” with proponents of that phrase seemingly thinking that it means that upper class people should tell lower class people to marry. But what upper class people practice is not “marriage.” It’s “marriage to upper class people.” Right?

Indeed, if you want an example of how a certain marriage proponent approached marriage in her own life, she conveniently had the New York Times announce the details of her marriage in 2001.

Melissa Jean Schettini, a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Louis A. Schettini of Montville, N.J., was married yesterday to Daniel Patrick Kearney Jr.

The bride and bridegroom, both 27, met at Princeton University, where they graduated, she summa cum laude.

Mrs. Kearney is a candidate for a Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

Her father owns Per Forms, a Montville company, which manufactures and markets business forms.

Next month, Mr. Kearney is to become a law student at Yale. He received a master’s degree in classical studies from Boston College.

The bridegroom’s father retired as the chief investment officer of Aetna, the insurance company in Hartford. He was also the president of its investments and financial services division.

Is the upshot from this kind of behavior really “people should get married”? Or is it “when the upper class boyfriend gets the letter from Yale law school, go ahead and lock that down”?

Is it offensive to write this? I gather from my surveying of the society that is. But why is it offensive? Is it because second-guessing people’s relationships is offensive? And if so, what should we make of people who write whole books doing that?

I take his point.  I remain convinced there are, on average, pro-social benefits to all when people marry.  

Are there lower probabilities or occurrence and greater probabilities of failure when it is a cross-marriage?  Cross-religion, cross-class, cross-race, cross-culture?  Sure.  We know these marriages can and do work.  We know they involve greater complexity.  They may possibly entail greater failure rates (I would default to that assumption but have not seen data on it.)  

I suspect that Bruenig is overstating just how hermetically sealed things are in terms of class.  But his general point that people assortatively mate within culture, class, education attainment, ethnicity, religion, etc. is usefully true.  And to the extent that it is strongly true, it raises legitimate questions about how transferable any policy might be across such groupings.