Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Story claims wives make more money

AP reports:
Report: More men get economic boost from marriage

NEW YORK — Historically, marriage was the surest route to financial security for women. Nowadays, it's men who are increasingly getting the biggest economic boost from tying the knot, according to a new analysis of census data.

The changes, summarized in a Pew Research Center report being released today, reflect the proliferation of working wives over the past 40 years — a period in which American women outpaced men in both education and earnings growth. A larger share of today's men, compared with their 1970 counterparts, are married to women whose education and income exceed their own, and a larger share of women are married to men with less education and income.
After you thru all that, it says that only 22% of wives out-earn their husbands. Some of that could be from husbands who are temporarily out of work, and may not reflect income at the time of marriage.

Update: A reader has another criticism below of the study. The NY Times article on the study included this:
Kristen W. Springer, a sociologist at Rutgers, has found that among men in their 50s, having a wife who earns more money is associated with poorer health. Among the highest earning couples in her study, a husband who earns less than his wife is 60 percent less likely to be in good health compared with men who earn more than their wives.
By phrasing it this way, the article makes it sound like the wife's high salary is causing bad health to the husband. But the wife's salary probably has nothing to do with it. People in poor health earn less money, for obvious reasons. So the healthy men in their 50s make more money than the unhealthy men in their 50s, and are therefore more likely to earn more than their wives.

1 comment:

AltonJohn said...

This study is bogus because it only looked at the wife's earnings. It therefore concluded that men benefit from marriage primarily because wives are contributing more to total household income. But the more important fact, which the study ignores, is that men's earnings increase when they are married. Married men earn much more than single men, but married women earn less than single women. The economic advantage of marriage is that husbands earn more even as their wives earn less.