With online dating apps, “Americans have increasingly been marrying someone more like themselves,” reports Bloomberg, citing new research that says this accounts for roughly half of the rise in household income inequality between 1980 and 2020:
Using data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey from 2008 to 2021, when online dating quickly became prevalent, the economists found that women became slightly more selective when choosing partners based on age, while men became slightly more selective based on education. But when the researchers compared that with data on married couples from 1960 and 1980, they found that people in the recent period increasingly went for partners with the same wage and education levels…
Overall, the predominance of online apps to find a future partner has led to a 3-percentage-point increase in the Gini coefficient — a widely used measure of income inequality, the research shows.
The reseachers were from the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and St. Louis, and from Haverford College, according to the article — which also includes this quote from their paper.
“We find that the increase in income inequality over the past half a century is explained to a large extent by sorting on vertical characteristics, such as income and skill, and their interaction with education.”