I would be more interested in studies on the people that “opt out” of this kind of hypergamy system and the personality traits that correlate with opting out, because I personally don’t know many people that fit this model (assuming the data that the article presents is correct and that there is a subset of the population for which hypergamy actually applies; I’m not convinced there aren’t confounding factors here).
The author says:
> I know many rich male Google programmers, but I have never seen any of them […] marry a beautiful hillbilly from West Virginia
Ok, how about a Facebook engineer who married a woman that grew up in rural East Tennessee? Is that close enough? I would say the author’s observation is more due to the limited crossover between FANG engineers and the rural southeastern U.S. than any sort of innate principles of attraction.
Curiously, my wife is four years older than me and had no interest in moving to the west coast for a so-called “higher status” job. I realize this is anecdata, but already it contradicts the two main premises of hypergamy (men marry younger and women want higher status). In fact, it took quite a bit of compromise for that move to occur, and from my perspective it had nothing to do with class or status either—my motivation was that I am interested in tech and the Bay Area is (was?) the geographical location of the most interesting jobs in that industry.
The author says:
> I know many rich male Google programmers, but I have never seen any of them […] marry a beautiful hillbilly from West Virginia
Ok, how about a Facebook engineer who married a woman that grew up in rural East Tennessee? Is that close enough? I would say the author’s observation is more due to the limited crossover between FANG engineers and the rural southeastern U.S. than any sort of innate principles of attraction.
Curiously, my wife is four years older than me and had no interest in moving to the west coast for a so-called “higher status” job. I realize this is anecdata, but already it contradicts the two main premises of hypergamy (men marry younger and women want higher status). In fact, it took quite a bit of compromise for that move to occur, and from my perspective it had nothing to do with class or status either—my motivation was that I am interested in tech and the Bay Area is (was?) the geographical location of the most interesting jobs in that industry.