Apparently the increase of women in the workforce is an important enough driver of income inequality to have merited a New York Times article (linked).

How's that you ask -- apparently men who now meet and marry coworkers no longer tend to marry their secretaries -- reducing upward mobility. Clearly a certain percentage of marriages must be arranged by the state to reduce this important driver of income inequality. At the very least, companies must immediate review policies about dating co-workers and superiors -- who knew that they should have set the opposite goals?
-- theircompetitor, Mar 03 2016

love and marriage http://www.nytimes....s=AUDDEVREMARK&_r=0
[theircompetitor, Mar 03 2016]

I would think that a certain percentage of marriages would be arranged by the internet, that great leveler. Or maybe not? Maybe internet-arranged dating all taps the same class group?
-- bungston, Mar 03 2016


I once dated my boss but he is dead now. Does that make me the new boss of me? Hmmm.
-- blissmiss, Mar 03 2016


Why would upwards mobility have to involve marriage?
-- Mindey, Mar 03 2016


Sigh. I remember the days of three races and two genders. Things were so much simpler.

You were richer than somebody and poorer than somebody, but they were people you knew and might have even had a meal with.

There are so many more boxes these days, and no one has the sense to stay in their box. It is so confusing and mostly just as silly.
-- popbottle, Mar 03 2016


Unlikely that there were enough secretaries to go around - probably statistically insignificant.

Or, to quote Christopher Moore, " All men were tampons once - things where better then. " (Island of the Sequined Love Nun)
-- normzone, Mar 04 2016


One state in India was paying men who married "untouchables". Not that I was considering it or anything.
-- 4and20, Mar 05 2016


OK, it's time for my regular "they tried this in classical antiquity" slot.

You'll all remember how ancient Athens had a sort of democracy while ancient Sparta did not. They fought a war. Sparta won. However, over the next few centuries, Sparta vanished virtually without trace, while Athens is now the capital of a united Greece (although that seems like a rather doubtful honour at present).

Ignoring for the time being external conquests (neither Sparta nor Athens could do much about the Macedonians or Romans, it turned out), Sparta's collapse seems to have been a sort of political-demographic process.

You see, although Sparta had a lot less democracy than Athens, it seems to have had significantly more gender-equality. That (according to some article I read as an undergraduate) led to assortative mating, which led to an ever smaller (but richer) ruling class - too small to keep its grip on the broader population. Also, back-of-envelope calculations based on some numbers from Thucydides and Xenophon suggested that the overall numbers of Spartans declined remarkably fast over ... well, just a century or so, really. That's despite the fact that, unlike Athens, they didn't have a great plague or lose a long war.

Now, Athens didn't have the state arrange marriages (though Plato thought that would be a good idea), but the restrictions on womens' rights in Athens (and, I suspect, most of the other city states), might have a similar effect in reducing the incidence and impact of assortative mating.

The precedent is worrying for anyone who would like (a) to be fair to women *and* (b) to keep western culture in existence *and* (c) to avoid a vast gulf between well-connected rich and alienated poor. It hasn't been proven that these three things form an "iron triangle" but, as I said, the precedent is worrying.
-- pertinax, Mar 07 2016



random, halfbakery