Why Don’t Wealthy Conservatives Who Promote Marriage Marry the Poor?
the argument that declining economic prospects for men near the bottom and improved economic prospects for women across the board has facilitated more relationship quits than before.
.. If the best arrangement you can put together says the 25th percentile broke even in a period where the economy more than doubled (which based on my series would suggest that below-25th percentile saw declines), it’s still clear that the economy left these men behind, which is perfectly adequate for the declining-attractiveness theory since mate attractiveness is relative to the society you find yourself
.. All of which is to say: Behind the veil, you’d prefer an institutional regime that didn’t effectively imprison you in bad relationships, lest you find yourself in one as a child or adult.
.. Douthat’s paragraph speaks of marriage and relationships in general terms, but in fact they are very specific things that contain within them very different people. Of late, conservatives have rallied behind the pithy line that people need to “preach what they practice” regarding marriage. But, in fact, people of Douthat’s ilk do not practice what they preach. They preach the importance of marrying poor and working class people, but they don’t actually marry any of these people.
They certainly could marry someone from those classes. Many a person would take up a spouse who makes six figures banging out a few blog posts each week. But they choose not to.After rigging the institutions to capture the majority of the national income and basically all of the national wealth, segregating themselves residentially, intermarrying almost solely in their rich enclaves, and even sealing off their schools from being accessed by the unwashed masses, these rich social conservatives turn around and implore others to marry people that they wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, people they can’t even bring themselves to make even the most minimal of community with.If this all was really that important to them (the most pressing issue in the entire country by their accounts), why don’t they marry any of these people? What is it about them that they find too unattractive to couple with? One really has to wonder.