"It's Not the Economy, Stupid," They Still Tell Us

The media continues to insist that "It Wasn't the Economy, Stupid" to those trying to understand the meaning of the U.S. presidential election of 2024. Exemplary of this is Sarah Bernstein's piece in the New York Times attributing the outcome of the election to America's "dating culture." Again seizing on the "male rage" theme ever popular with the culture war addicts, Ms. Bernstein argues for the ultimate source of said rage being the expectation that males be the bread-winners in their households--that if it is now the norm for married women to work, the men bring home a significantly larger paycheck--has led to frustration among both men and women, especially in an era in which the "gender gap" in pay has narrowed, and a rising proportion of women enjoy superior educational and occupational outcomes to a rising proportion of the male population. (Men who cannot meet the resulting higher income standard find a growing proportion of women ruling them out as prospects.)

I will not go so far as to argue that there is nothing to this. It does seem to me that men and women do widely hold the expectation Ms. Bernstein talks about, and all the statistics I have seen testify to the substance of the shift in relative incomes that she describes. However, as an explanation of the election, or even the dating woes of the population, it is sadly lacking. After all, while the income gap between men and women has narrowed, this has largely been a matter of stagnation or erosion of incomes for the vast majority of males when income is taken in inflation-adjusted terms rather than of women's incomes catching up to those of prosperous male counterparts. (Indeed, median female income actually held steady as a proportion of per capita GDP from the 1950s to today.) As the situation also implies given that relative to many of the essentials of daily living (housing, auto ownership, higher education, health insurance premiums, etc.) the purchasing power of those male incomes has collapsed, with every sign indicating that collapse's continuing with no end in sight , all as economic insecurity generally is increasing.

The result is that even if women have caught men up this way what they have actually caught up to, contrary to the impression Ms. Bernstein gives of women doing so well that they can easily support not just themselves but a "househusband," means that few women interested in the financing of a household, a marriage, the rearing of children can really afford to give no thought to a partner contributing a second income, and indeed a fairly significant one. Accordingly the fact that women, even relatively high-income women, expect that a prospective partner make at least as much as they do, reflects hard economic reality--reality which would endure regardless of notions about gender. However, that observation would be unlikely to appear in an essay in the Times, or any other publication of its ilk, which much prefer to focus on the differences across the gender line than the differences which cut across it, while gaslighting the public with insistences that "You've never had it so good" as they struggle harder and harder to make ends meet in ways that those who write for the opinion pages of publications like these have rarely ever had to do.