The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  a fifth or more: Greenwood et al., “Marry Your Like,” 352. This effect operates, in significant part, through rising female labor force participation, especially among better-educated women. As educated women increasingly work, assortative mating increasingly compounds household income inequality, and random mating would increasingly reduce household income inequality.

  less educated counterparts: They also bear children later in life: mothers’ mean age at their first birth is roughly 23 for women without a bachelor’s degree, 29.5 for women with a BA only, and 31.1 for women with at least some graduate education. Murray, Coming Apart, 40. An alternative study that uses less fine-grained categories confirms the basic story told by these numbers. In 2010, mean age at first birth for women college graduates was roughly 30, for women with high school diplomas or some college it was roughly 24, and for women with less than a high school education it was roughly 20. Kay Hymowitz et al., Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America, National Marriage Project (2013), 8, http://nationalmarriageproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/KnotYet-FinalForWeb.pdf. Hereafter cited as Hymowitz et al., Knot Yet.

  across all education levels: In 1970, out-of-marriage births accounted for 10.7 percent of all births. Stephanie J. Ventura and Christine A. Bachrach, Nonmarital Childbearing in the United States, 1940–99, National Center for Health Statistics, Division of Vital Statistics (October 18, 2000), 17, www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr48/nvs48_16.pdf. An alternative report finds a slightly larger share—nearer to 15 percent than to 10 percent. Hymowitz et al., Knot Yet, 7; Murray, Coming Apart, 161. According to Sara McLanahan and Christine Percheski, “Family Structure and the Reproduction of Inequalities,” Annual Review of Sociology 34 (2008): 257–76, the share was one in twenty.

  born outside of marriage: Moreover, only about 10 percent of college-educated women and 5 percent of women with post-college educations bear children before marriage. Hymowitz et al., Knot Yet, 8, reports that as of the 2010 census, 12 percent of women with college degrees are unmarried at first birth; it was 8 percent as of the 2000 census. The cited figure for mothers with post-college degrees is calculated from CDC VitalStats data on 2010 Births. For more information, see Jennifer Silva, “The 1 Percent Ruined Love: Marriage Is for the Rich,” Salon, July 27, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.salon.com/2013/07/27/the_1_percent_ruined_love_marriage_is_for_the_rich/, hereafter cited as Silva, “The 1 Percent Ruined Love”; Galena K. Rhoades and Scott M. Stanley, “Before I Do: What Do Premarital Experiences Have to Do with Marital Quality Among Today’s Young Adults?,” National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, 11, http://nationalmarriageproject.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/NMP-BeforeIDoReport-Final.pdf; Murray, Coming Apart, 161; Jason DeParle, “Two Classes Divided by ‘I Do,’” New York Times, July 14, 2012, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-divided-by-i-do.html, hereafter cited as DeParle, “Two Classes”; Robert D. Putnam, Carl B. Frederick, and Kaisa Snellman, “Growing Class Gaps in Social Connectedness Among American Youth,” Harvard Kennedy School of Government, The Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America, July 12, 2012, Figure 1, accessed January 12, 2019, https://hceconomics.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file_uploads/Putnam-etal_2012_Growing-Class-Gaps.pdf, hereafter cited as Putnam, Frederick, and Snellman, “Growing Class Gaps.”

  This difference feeds back into income inequality. Depending on how one measures, between 14 and 40 percent of household income inequality’s overall growth in recent years may be attributed to the increasingly different rates of single parenthood among lower-middle- and upper-middle-income families. See DeParle, “Two Classes.” See also Bruce Western, Deirdre Bloom, and Christine Percheski, “Inequality Among American Families with Children, 1975–2005,” American Sociological Review 73, no. 6 (2008): 903–20, hereafter cited as Western, Bloom, and Percheski, “Inequality Among American Families”; Gary Burtless, “Effects of Growing Wage Disparities and Changing Family Composition on the U.S. Income Distribution,” Center on Social and Economic Dynamics, Working Paper No. 4 (July 1999), 12, hereafter cited as Burtless, “Effects of Growing Wage Disparities”; Robert I. Lerman, “The Impact of the Changing U.S. Family Structure on Child Poverty and Income Inequality,” Economica 63, no. 250 (1996): S122, hereafter cited as Lerman, “The Impact of the Changing U.S. Family Structure.”

  nearly 60 percent of all children are born outside of marriage: Moreover, 40 percent of these mothers have children before marrying. See “Vital Stats Data,” Centers for Disease Control (2010), www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/vitalstats/VitalStats_Births.htm. Jennifer Silva points out in “The 1 Percent Ruined Love” that “while nine out of ten college-educated women wait to have children until after they get married, only six out of ten with a high school degree postpone childbearing until after marriage.” See also DeParle, “Two Classes”; Western, Bloom, and Percheski, “Inequality Among American Families”; Burtless, “Effects of Growing Wage Disparities”; Lerman, “The Impact of the Changing U.S. Family Structure.”

  Even new mothers who possess some college education remain five times as likely to have given birth outside of marriage as new mothers who have completed a college degree. Data from the 2010 American Community Survey show that among women who gave birth to a child during the year prior to the survey, 31 percent of those with some college were unmarried, while 6 percent of those with a BA or more were unmarried. See DeParle, “Two Classes.” See Jank and Owens, “Inequality in the United States,” slide 24, for data from the June 2008 Current Population Survey, showing that for mothers between fifteen and twenty-nine years old, 47.6 percent of those with some college who had a child in the past year did so outside of marriage, while only 18.2 percent of those with at least a bachelor’s degree did so. For mothers between thirty and forty-four, the shares were 20.8 percent and 7.1 percent respectively.

  two years after marriage: See Hymowitz et al., Knot Yet, reporting that for mothers with a high school diploma or some college, the mean age at first birth is twenty-four and the median age at first marriage is twenty-six, while for mothers with a college degree, the mean age at first birth is thirty while the median age at first marriage is twenty-eight. The same information may be found in the project’s full report at http://nationalmarriageproject.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/KnotYet-FinalForWeb-041413.pdf, 18, Figures 10A–10C.

  back to 1960 levels: Murray, Coming Apart, 353.

  35 percent versus roughly 15 percent: Jank and Owens, “Inequality in the United States,” slide 25. See Steven P. Martin, “Trends in Marital Dissolution by Women’s Education in the United States,” Demographic Research 15 (2006): 537, 546, Table 1 for a report of Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data showing that, for women first married in 1990–94, 46.3 percent of those with no high school degree are divorced within ten years of married, as compared to 37.9 percent with a high school diploma, 36 percent with some college, 16.5 percent with a four-year degree, and 14.4 percent with a master’s or professional degree. Jennifer Silva similarly writes that “women with a four-year college degree are half as likely as other women to experience marital dissolution in the first ten years of a marriage.” See Silva, “The 1 Percent Ruined Love.”

  Divorce rates are typically expressed in terms of the odds of divorce within some number of years of marriage, and so their calculation depends on the choice of the number of years. An alternative tabulation concludes that divorce rates roughly tripled for all Americans between 1960 and 1980 and then doubled again between 1980 and 2010 for Americans without college degrees (both for those with high school educations only and for those with some college but no BA), but remained effectively flat for Americans with a college education or more. Ben Casselman, “Marriage Isn’t Dead—Yet,” FiveThirtyEight, September 29, 2014, accessed November 18, 2018, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/marriage-isnt-dead-yet/. Casselman uses data from the U.S. Census to compute the pe
rcentage of once married Americans aged thirty-five to forty-four who had been divorced. Between 1960 and 1980, this percentage rose nearly identically—from roughly 3.5 percent to roughly 11.5 percent—for those with high school educations only, with some college but no degree, and with a BA. Between 1980 and 2010, the share rose again, roughly in tandem, for the first two groups, reaching about 20 percent. For Americans with a BA, it stayed between 10 and 12 percent.

  high school educations only: D’Vera Cohn et al., “Barely Half of U.S. Adults Are Married—a Record Low,” Pew Research Center, December 14, 2011, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/12/14/barely-half-of-u-s-adults-are-married-a-record-low/; Jank and Owens, “Inequality in the United States,” slide 23.

  a rich person’s affair: This is literally true. Enduring marriages correlate with income growth and high incomes: median incomes in households with unmarried heads (both male and female) grew steadily from 1950 to 1970 but have been effectively flat ever since; median household incomes for married couples, by contrast, have grown almost without interruption through the present day. See Jank and Owens, “Inequality in the United States,” slide 26, using data from www.recessiontrends.org [inactive] updated with 2010 census data and data from the census historical income tables. For the original data used in creating the graph, see U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical Income Tables: Families,” last revised August 28, 2018, www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-families.html.

  households in the top third: The share of the top third grew from 5 percent to 12 percent; the share of the middle third grew from 5 percent to 29 percent. DeParle, “Two Classes.” Between the 1964 and 1994 birth cohorts of non-Hispanic whites, the percentage of high school sophomores living with a single parent nearly doubled among the lowest socioeconomic status quartile even as it declined (very) slightly among the highest quartile. See Putnam, Frederick, and Snellman, “Growing Class Gaps,” Figure 2.

  The size of the differences: These shares are calculated using data collected by the Census Bureau for the 2018 Current Population Survey. See U.S. Census Bureau, “Current Population Survey (CPS),” www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/data-detail.html.

  both their biological parents: Murray, Coming Apart, 269. Murray uses data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Mature Women, Young Women, and Youth for children whose mothers turned forty between 1997 and 2004. To identify the richest and best-educated zip codes, Murray used the shares of adults with a college education and median family incomes, which he standardized and ranked. Murray, Coming Apart, Appendix C.

  money troubles strain marriages: Sarah Stuchell and Ruth Houston Barrett, “Clinical Update: Financial Strain on Families,” American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy Magazine (May 2010).

  especially for women: Karen C. Holden and Pamela J. Smock, “The Economic Costs of Marital Dissolution: Why Do Women Bear a Disproportionate Cost?,” Annual Review of Sociology 17 (August 1991): 51–78.

  more volatile: Tom Hertz, Understanding Mobility in America, Center for American Progress (April 26, 2006), 29, https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2006/04/Hertz_MobilityAnalysis.pdf. Hertz found that “income security is rising for households in the top decile. For the middle class, however, an increase in income volatility has led to an increase in the frequency of large negative income shocks.” For a visual representation of this reality, see Peter Gosselin and Seth Zimmerman, “Trends in Income Volatility and Risk, 1970–2004,” Urban Institute Working Paper (2008), 27, Figure 3. However, see also Peter Gottschalk and Robert Moffitt, “The Rising Instability of US Earnings,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 23, no. 4 (Fall 2019): Figure 2, for a chart showing volatility increasing for the bottom quartile, the middle 50 percent, and the top quartile, but at a much higher rate for the bottom quartile.

  doubled between 1970 and 2000: On the probability of an average person experiencing an income drop of 50 percent or more, see Karen Dynan, Douglas Elmendorf, and Daniel Sichel, “The Evolution of Household Income Volatility,” B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy 12, no. 2 (2012): 17, Figure 3, showing that the probability of an income decline of greater than 50 percent increased from 7 percent in 1971 to 13 percent in 2005, before dropping to around 10 percent in 2008. On the prevalence of a 50 percent or greater drop in family income, see Jacob S. Hacker and Elisabeth Jacobs, “The Rising Instability of American Family Incomes, 1969–2004: Evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics,” Economic Policy Institute, EPI Briefing Paper No. 213 (2008), Figure C. For an analysis of the data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, see Hacker, The Great Risk Shift, 31–32, Figure 1.4. Hacker deduced that an average’s person’s chance of experiencing an income drop of 50 percent or more increased from around 7 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 2002.

  stress impedes children’s development: W. Jean Yeung, Miriam R. Linver, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, “How Money Matters for Young Children’s Development: Parental Investment and Family Processes,” Child Development, 73, no. 6 (December 2002): 1872, Figure 2. Yeung, Linver, and Brooks-Gunn demonstrate that a decrease in family income affects child cognitive ability through many different pathways—economic pressures, changing the physical home environment, reducing the number of cognitively stimulating materials available, and making the cost of childcare unaffordable. For a discussion about the impact of a familial job or income loss on a child’s mental health, see Vonnie C. McLoyd, “Socialization and Development in a Changing Economy: The Effects of Paternal Job and Income Loss on Children,” American Psychologist 44, no. 2 (1989): 298–99. McLoyd concludes that while these factors can negatively impact a child’s mental health and ability to interact normally with peers, the effects are not necessarily long-lasting.

  than their unexposed siblings: Anna Aizer, Laura Stroud, and Stephen Buka, “Maternal Stress and Child Outcomes: Evidence from Siblings,” Journal of Human Resources 51, no. 3 (August 2016): 353. Hereafter cited as Aizer, Stroud, and Buka, “Maternal Stress.” The children also suffered 48 percent more chronic illnesses. This paper carries out robustness checks to rule out other explanations, involving causes correlated with in utero stress but that don’t operate through prenatal development. “We include the following controls: maternal race (indicator for black), maternal education, marital status at birth, maternal age at birth, family income during pregnancy, offspring gender, number of siblings at age 7, birth order, whether the husband lives at home with the mother, and the number of times the family moved between birth and age 7 (a measure of instability), as well as the week of gestation that the cortisol was measured. We also include an indicator for whether the mother worked during pregnancy (a potential source of stress) and whether there was any pregnancy complication to control for the possibility that the increase in maternal cortisol observed simply reflects maternal anxiety over the health of the fetus.”

  Another study surveyed pregnant women who were exposed to grave danger—in a massive earthquake—but ended up unharmed in order to isolate the independent effects of stress in itself, and again found “much lower levels of cognitive ability” in children exposed to gestational stress than in unexposed control groups. Florencia Torche, “Prenatal Exposure to an Acute Stressor and Children’s Cognitive Outcomes,” Demography 55, no. 5 (October 2018): 1617–18. Hereafter cited as Torche, “Prenatal Exposure.”

  As research mounts, concern about prenatal stress is entering the broader public arena. See Annie Murphy Paul, Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives (New York: Free Press, 2011). A recently released film, In Utero, also explores our time in the womb and its impact on human health and society. See Kathleen Man Gyllenhaal, In Utero, filmstrip, 85 mins. (2015).

  befalls non-elite mothers: See Aizer, Stroud, and Buka, “Maternal Stress,” Table 8; Torche, “Prenatal Exposure.”

  among the youngest children: In a study of mothers with small children conducted over the period
between 2003 and 2010, mothers with a high school education or less (roughly the bottom two-thirds of the distribution) spent about forty-five minutes in developmental childcare, while mothers with a BA or more (roughly the top third) spent over an hour. Putnam, Frederick, and Snellman, “Growing Class Gaps,” 10–11.

  their children’s development: Mothers with high school degrees only devoted a few more minutes per day than college-educated mothers, while high-school-only fathers spent less time than fathers with college degrees, so that overall parental investment was roughly equal across children of educated and uneducated parents. June Carbone and Naomi Cahn, Marriage Markets: How Inequality Is Remaking the American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 85–86. Hereafter cited as Carbone and Cahn, Marriage Markets.

  increased their investments more rapidly: Carbone and Cahn, Marriage Markets, 85–86.

  twice as rapidly, according to one study: Reardon, “No Rich Child Left Behind.” Reardon refers to Meredith Phillips, “Parenting, Time Use, and Disparities in Academic Outcomes,” in Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, ed. Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Munane (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011), 210–11. Hereafter cited as Phillips, “Parenting, Time Use, and Disparities in Academic Outcomes.”

  high-school-only parents: Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey, “The Rug Rat Race,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Spring 2010): 134–37. Mothers with college degrees spend perhaps six more hours each week with their children than do their less educated counterparts. On top of the six additional hours per week spent by mothers, college-educated fathers spend three additional hours per week educating their children. Ramey and Ramey narrow their focus to parents aged twenty-five to thirty-four, and define childcare as “care of infants, care of older children, medical care of children, playing with children, helping with homework, reading to and talking with children, dealing with childcare providers, and travel related to childcare” (133). This definition emphasizes immediate interactions with children and excludes any number of activities—shopping, cleaning, preparing food, keeping watch, and maintaining a safe house—that might also be classed as childcare more broadly understood. The narrow definition thus focuses on activities that contribute directly to children’s emotional development and intellectual education.