The risks for dating your assistant or a nurse are higher compared to what it was 30-60 years ago for example. Now it's safer to date someone at the same income level. Or someone in the same social group but outside of work, which will tend to be the same income level again compared to a workplace.

The other part is probably driven by how there are more dual income families competing for the same limited resources, such as housing, making the income of your spouse more relevant.

Additionally, I think you are conflating education with social standing, when they are somewhat different, and there have been different levels of social pressure against doing either at different times in history.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w19829

I agree that females who would have become nurses and secretaries in the past are now becoming physicians and executives, and without doubt this a good thing. My observation is just that by solving one problem (limited opportunities for women to become professionals) we inadvertently encouraged another (assortive mating on the rise which reinforces inequality).

It's also interesting you mention social pressure at different times in history. I am working my way through Downtown Abbey at the moment and it reminds me that throughout history there have been strong pressures for people to marry within their own class/caste systems. Probably for many reasons, but one of them is certainly the maintenance of wealth and power, which has typically been far less equal throughout those historical periods than the US is today. The post WW1 period in the US has been the exception not the norm.

If the nurse or secretary of 20 or more years ago was "from a good family", what change was really spurred by the union?

That's the uncontroversial perspective, yes. The more controversial, but far better-supported-by-evidence perspective is that the estimated 40-80% contribution that genes make to people's intelligence, conscientiousness, and work ethic is much more likely to be at play, here.

I don't think you really need to get into genetics to explain anything here. Some people get lucky, their children inherit their wealth and maybe squander it after a few generations, or maybe they don't. Neither the parents nor the children need to be particularly smart; they just need to get lucky.

Using money as a measure of intelligence is very risky. On the one hand, sure, everyone wants to be filthy rich (presumably) so there's a lot of competition. On the other hand, there are large swaths of the whole world population that will find it impossible to be the next Zuckerberg or the next Bill Gates- say, a daughter of a Bangladeshi weaver is probably not going to travel to Silicon Valley and fund the next unicorn startup, sell it for billions and bequeath some of them to her children.

That's not because of a difference in intelligence with someone who will follow that path. It's because we can't fit 7 billion people in Silicon Valley, and a few tens of thousands of jobs in tech.

I guess you can argue that the people who are already in Silicon Valley have some sort of genetic advantage but unfortunately that way lies a whole bunch of very gnarly racial bias that is going to be extremely fiddly to untangle. Therefore, see above: using money as a measure of intelligence is very risky.

hah, ok, go ahead and make that claim with zero links to back it up. Please, tell me more about eugenics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jZENi1ed8

Four studies cited on this handy chart:

https://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/iq-heritability-...

It's very well-established science that you could have easily googled, but downvoting unpopular research, pointing and shrieking "eugenics!" is a better argumentation technique, I suppose.

From the abstract: "Intelligence is one of the most heritable behavioural traits."

(However, it is true that saying that genes contribute to intelligence isn't eugenics. Eugenics is a methodology where you attempt to selectively breed humankind by broader intent, rather than by emergent properties of human tendencies. A proposed trait to optimize is often intelligence, but similarly frequently it's attractiveness and things like that. Genetic influence on intelligence is simply a hypothesis whose testing would have consequences on the practice of eugenics.)

------- edit ------- I see your reply to the other comment. I think a quote from the article that makes your point far better is "[...] studies have consistently shown that genetic influence on individual differences in intelligence is substantial." I negligently assumed you were specifically talking about heritability.

From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability): "Heritability is a statistic used in breeding and genetics works that estimates how much variation in a phenotypic trait in a population is due to genetic variation among individuals in that population."

The section titled "Intelligence brings (some) genetics to ‘social’ epidemiology" addresses your concerns about environmental factors.

I don't think it's very controversial to say genes contribute to intelligence. Genes contribute to everything, how could they not affect intelligence? This isn't eugenics, nobody is saying we should (or could) use this information to selectively breed humans, and nobody is saying intelligence can be correlated to race.

We know that selection happens at the level of genes, not individuals. You can't measure the fitness of genes by evaluating their effects solely on individuals because their effects may involve ensembles of individuals. Since humans are highly social beings, I'd expect our genes to be selected for intelligence at the level of cooperating brains as well as individual brains. There doesn't seem to be much research on measuring this aspect of intelligence.

Society vilifies motherhood? Then all the dads who want to put the borked society back together again can take up the mantle of the caring parent. Be my guests, eh.

Because the wife won't allow it; it's extremely unattractive to women to be a stay-at-home-husband, or so I've been told (by women).

Women have mad inroads in the workplace. Women don't necessarily look to 'marry up' and stay home, they can be the executive now.

The secretary still gets married, she's just the second wife.