You know that old saying? The rich get richer. Now it seems the rich also settle down and marry, stay married, and have a higher happiness rating than the those that didn’t graduate college and are making a lower income.
There used to be a myth that financially stable, professional women were unlucky in love. We’ve all seen the sterotypes in movies. The successful female executive, a total bitch, always gets dumped at the end of the movie, usually in some humiliating fashion.
In this case, the numbers profess the opposite.
From the International Times:
But when it comes to marriage, the two Americas aren’t divided by gender. And it’s not the career girls on the losing end. It’s their less educated manicurists or housekeepers, women who might arguably be less able to live on their own.
The emerging gulf is instead one of class — what demographers, sociologists and those who study the often depressing statistics about the wedded state call a “marriage gap” between the well-off and the less so.Statistics show that college educated women are more likely to marry than non-college educated women — although they marry, on average, two years later.
It makes sense, people tend to marry individuals from the same background as their own: race, religion, class, local YMCA, all that shit.
So what can we do about it? Make folks marry into a lower class?
That might not be a popular idea. What this highlights, more than anything, is the need for more affordable education along with the creation of more high-paying industrial jobs that used to be the bread and butter of the American family.
Maybe in the past, a man with little education nevertheless had a good-paying manufacturing job, with a health care and pension plan. He was a catch and represented stability.
Today, it may be hyperbolic to talk about the emasculation of the blue-collar man. But it is not only liberals concerned with the wealth gap who are watching these national trends with alarm. Social and religious conservatives have called on society to do more to address economic strains faced by this class.
Those that think there is no class warfare in America must be smoking something. But this study, I don’t believe, has anything to do with class warfare, this is just normal human behavior. This does show, however, the need for government programs that address poverty and inequality. Despite George Bush’s supreme faith of charity to solve our domestic problem, if left uncheck the gap between the haves and have-nots will grow exponentially. Problems feed other problems, tax cuts make the rich more money and takes away from the government’s ability to adress this issue.
Welfare doesn’t work. The key is education. Conservatives love to use the parable: You can catch a man a fish and he will eat for the night; or you can teach him how to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life. The problem is, Republicans don’t want to fork over any money for a fishing rod. They’d rather save that money for themselves and reinvest it in some dynamite so they could blow up the world.
Imagine if we spent half of what we spend in Iraq opening up affordable public colleges, bombarded with scholarships and grants of shock and awe proportions. Imagine if we sent battalions of teachers into the inner cities to capture the hearts and minds of the children and teach them tools to shape their future.
They might even be able to run their own government one day.
