One study indicated that if the marriage patterns of 1960 were imported into 2005, the Gini coefficient for the American economy — the standard measure of income inequality — would fall to 0.34 from 0.43, a considerable drop, given that the scale runs from zero to one. That result is from the economist Jeremy Greenwood, a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and other co-authors.
Read the whole piece. I think Tyler is right to consider this a bottom-up exercise in eugenics. My guess is that his NYT readers will hate that analysis, while at the same time behaving in ways to reinforce it.
Correction posted at NYT relevant to the excerpt above:
“Correction: December 30, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated, using statistics from a study that was later corrected, the effect on a standard measure of income equality of importing marriage patterns of 1960 into 2005. The mating patterns, combined with labor supply, marriage and divorce decisions. would account for a 33.3 percent rise in income inequality, not a drop in income inequality to 0.34 from 0.43 on a scale of zero to one.”
Who corrects the correctors?
So what is the actual point?
The Times article now reads:
So the point is probably that the effect is not as strong as was claimed in the original version quoted at top.
But I think that correction broke the correction writer’s brain as the correction seems through bizarre construction to claim the effect cited in the original version is reversed, not merely lower.
What happens to the Gini coefficient when you replace “combined household income” with “combined SAT scores”?
Its good analysis. I’m also reminded of a NYT piece about marriage patterns going back till 1880.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-richer-people-marry.html
One question though is what good it does. A lot of these people are dual earners in high rent cities, slaving away just to pay the rent and then not having a lot of eugenic offspring because they can’t afford it.
Most good eugenics seems to come from smart conservative men marrying smart conservative women and then raising a big family in the suburbs. To the extent smart urban progressives even manage to get married, they are producing few children.
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/liberalism-hbd-population-and-solutions-for-the-future/
What use is the Gini Coefficient, other than as a made-up, leftist, mindless, political weapon?
A statistic is only useful as a guide to looking at processes, and then only if the processes explain the statistical effect.
What is the Gini supposed to be for any society? When a totalitarian society suppresses the incomes of the vast majority of the population, is that lower Gini supposed to be good?
If athletes earn more in the US than say in Cuba, is that supposed to be bad? It does raise the Gini of the US as compared to Cuba.
It’s not simply an artifact of mindless leftism. People care about inequality, and it’s likely ingrained via evolutionary pressures. It’s libertarians – and that bizarre subset of global conservatives dubbed American Conservatives – who are the weird ones on this score. Having said that, people don’t compare themselves to 300 million others pace the progressives, they compare themselves to friends and family.