Online dating may be partly responsible for the increase in income inequality in the United States in recent decades, according to a Research work.
Since the advent of dating apps that allow people to search for a partner based on criteria such as education, Americans are increasingly likely to marry someone more similar to themselves. That explains about half of the increase in income inequality between households between 1980 and 2020, researchers at the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and St. Louis and Haverford College found.
Using data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey from 2008 to 2021, when online dating was rapidly gaining popularity, the economists found that women became slightly more selective in choosing a partner based on age, while men became slightly more selective based on education.
However, when researchers compared this data with data from married couples in 1960 and 1980, they found that in recent times, people have increasingly chosen partners with the same income and education levels. And while many people married someone of the same ethnicity, over time people have become less selective about race.
Who people marry has a major impact on household income. Research shows that the two main factors contributing to inequality in choosing a future spouse are education and skills. To a much lesser extent, income and age follow, while race plays a relatively insignificant role, said co-author Paulina Restrepo-Echavarría, an economic policy adviser at the St. Louis Fed, in a Blog post Description of the paper.
Overall, the dominance of online dating apps has led to a three percentage point increase in the Gini coefficient – a widely used measure of income inequality – the study shows.
“We conclude that the increase in income inequality over the past half century can be explained to a large extent by sorting on vertical characteristics such as income and skill, and their interaction with education,” the economists write in their paper.