Ross Douthat’s New York Times column yesterday about the infamous “Princeton mom” letter (in which she advises Princeton women to find a suitable mate at college), sparked it’s own controversy and commentary.
Douthat’s thesis was essentially this: The Princeton mom got in trouble for saying publicly the things elites already intuitively understand.
As he writes,
“Of course Ivy League schools double as dating services. Of course members of elites — yes, gender egalitarians, the males as well as the females — have strong incentives to marry one another, or at the very least find a spouse from within the wider meritocratic circle. What better way to double down on our pre-existing advantages? What better way to minimize, in our descendants, the chances of the dread phenomenon known as ‘regression to the mean’?
That this ‘assortative mating,’ in which the best-educated Americans increasingly marry one another, also ends up perpetuating existing inequalities seems blindingly obvious, which is no doubt why it’s considered embarrassing and reactionary to talk about it too overtly.
Douthat’s comments reminded me of another New York Times column from a couple years ago, which asked the question,
“Does gender equality produce income inequality?
Women were long inadvertent but key drivers of social mobility. Marrying the boss was one way for the secretary to escape her social background and lift her offspring into a higher stratum of income, networks and cultural sophistication.”
… Doctors used to marry nurses. Now doctors marry doctors.
I don’t have any brilliant analysis to add, other than to say that this is yet another example of the unintended consequences associated with societal change. Even the most salutary societal changes that appear to be only classifiable as “progress,” still create some sort of cultural backlash.