The rich and educated are more likely to marry, to marry each other, and to produce rich and educated children. But this virtual cycle turns vicious for the poor.

How America's Marriage Crisis 

Makes Income Inequality So Much Worse

DEREK THOMPSON

The familiar story about income inequality and the lost middle class often starts with bots and boxes.

Technology and automation (often summed up as "robots") have destroyed routine-based middle-class jobs, widening the gap between the rich and poor. Globalization (i.e.: international trade, symbolized by the container box) has eliminated a swath of well-paid work, like manufacturing.

But forget about technology and trade for a moment. There is a more human story to tell about middle class woes. It's a story about marriage.

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Imagine the Typical American Family: Married, living together, with at least one kid under 18. That family earned a median income of $81,000 last year, as Ben Casselman showed with new Census data. That's a fine income, and it's growing, if slowly, even after you adjust for inflation.

But look closer at where all the money's come from in the last few decades. It's not the husband. It's coming from the wife.

Marriage used to be a pairing of opposites: Men would work for pay and women would work at home. But in the second half of the 20th century, women flooded the labor force, raising their participation rate from 32 percent, in 1950, to nearly 60 percent in the last decade. As women closed the education gap, the very nature of marriage has changed. It has slowly become an arrangement pairing similarly rich and educated people. Ambitious workaholics used to seek partners who were happy to take care of the house. Today, they're more likely to seek another ambitious workaholic.

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