April 18, 2011

"Will Women Marry Down?"

Kay Hymnowitz writes in The Daily Caller:
Still, the biggest reason we probably won’t see a lot more college-educated women walking down the aisle with their plumber is one we don’t like to say out loud: they want to have smart kids. Educated men and women are drawn to spouses they think will help them produce the children likely to thrive in the contemporary knowledge-based economy. That means high IQ, ambitious, and organized kids who will do their homework and take a lot of AP courses. The preference for alpha kids is the reason there is a luxury market for Ivy League egg and sperm donors. It also explains why, though we don’t have solid research distinguishing between elite and State U mating choices, Ms. Harvard will probably not accept a proposal from Mr. Florida State. The economist Greg Mankiw has quipped that “Harvard is probably the world’s most elite dating agency.” A glance at the New York Times nuptial pages suggests he’s right. 
In this respect, homogamy, at least educational homogamy, has a profound social downside; it increases economic inequality. Educated couples pass on the smarts and habits to their children that lead to good jobs and nice homes with lots of enriching activities for the grandkids, while the children and grandkids of less-educated men and women remain behind. 
Americans don’t like to think of themselves as class conscious. But marriage brings out the snob in the most democratic man or woman — for better or worse.

Marriage (and, thus, reproduction) is important enough to bring out the snob in everybody.


203 comments:

«Oldest   ‹Older   201 – 203 of 203
Stan said...

Walter at 4/19/11 5:05 PM said:
"The ultimate form of marrying down is to marry one outside one's race...simply because by marrying outside one's race one will pass on fewer of his or her own genes."

I don't see how marrying within your race means you will pass on more of your genes. Please explain.

Suppose I marry an educated swpl woman and have the average 1.4 children, and then they have 1.4, etc. Eventually my gene line will die out, like Abe Lincoln's did.
I can forsee a fututre generation where I have just 2 descendants left, and one is gay and the other a spinster, and then it's over.

On the other hand, suppose I have lots of kids with lots of ghetto women, and my offspring turn out to be thugs and welfare queens who reproduce like mad, and in a few generations there are hundreds of them.

It seems to me that if you want to maximize your genetic legacy you should go for quantity not quality.

JSM said...

Stan,

Sperm is cheap. You can, from a strictly biological standpoint, make your 1.4 White kids with your White wife and then knock up 10, or even 100, black women.

But who are you better off *provisioning*? Since it would be impossible to provision them all, you should provision the White kids, since they have more copies of your genes (because your White wife has more genes in common with you than your Black consorts.)

The question here, is, are White WOMEN marrying down? Yes. Because pregnancy and lactation are costly. At best a woman can only have 20 kids. She's more likely to only have 1.4. If SHE crossbreeds, then her own kids carry fewer copies of her own genes to be propagated into the next generation than had the father been White, same as the half-Black kids of a White man, but the White man has the option of having MORE kids to make up for it. SHE does not.

*****

Now, many White men are so mad at White women for feminism that they feel more loyalty to men of other races than they do their own White wives, mothers, sisters.
Those fellas need to understand, NO, you as a White man do NOT have more in common genetically with a man of another race than you do with a White female. Plenty of MRAs make this false statement.

Mona Monro said...

Steve Sailor’s iSteve Blog define the question of women marry down. Educated men and women are drawn to spouses they think will help them produce the children likely to thrive in the contemporary knowledge-based economy.

«Oldest ‹Older   201 – 203 of 203   Newer› Newest»