Comment by nugget

There are some interesting social trends at work here. One of the most interesting to me is the concept of Assortive Mating. This is the idea that 30 years ago a physician, for example, would likely marry a nurse, or an executive would likely marry his secretary. Whereas today, the physician marries the executive and the nurse marries the secretary instead. Rather than pair one high and one low income/wealth/status individual together and reduce overall inequality, the gap (financially, socially, and culturally) is now widened even more. And of course this inequality is very likely to impact the next generation because the well educated, high income parents (now with more uniformly high income extended families) tend to give a higher level of attention, resources, and support to their children compared to the children of the poor, working, and middle classes.