> Poor Americans are probably more likely to marry in the early 20s vs career-minded

Poor vs career-minded? Aren't the poor more likely to be career-minded in order to improve their situation? These don't seem mutually-exclusive at all. I don't see why being poor makes it more likely for one to marry earlier, either.

Semantics: "career-minded" implies plans for advanced education and longer term professional career goals which would correlate to delayed marriage and family.

neither of which seem to be excluded by the word "poor".

My perception of poverty is that it's a transitional state, where people are interested in leaving it.

Depending on how poor they are, the transition may be slow, and to a rich person, they may only seem to be moving between different tiers of poverty, but that doesn't mean they aren't career-minded.

In particular, I would think that the poor vs the not-poor feel more need to delay marriage and family until they feel they can better afford it after having achieved long-term educational and career goals.

There will be a lot of variation among individuals, but as a demographic generalization, those from more blue-collar communities seem to start sooner with marriage and family, and probably even have tax and other financial incentives to do so. Being rich gives you options and the confidence of upward mobility; being poor usually doesn't.

The poor don't have careers, they work jobs. But there is a lot of debate about how many of the middle class who claim to have careers really do. The economy cannot support an unlimited amount of fulfilling work with a full lifetime set of levels to advance through

Not in the same way. The poor see a job without a next step. They don't see themselves becoming foreman, or any higher paid position of more responsibility. The career-minded are looking to see how they can get a better position. Maybe eventually the career minded will decide that something is far enough - they stop at senior engineer don't make me management or architect (there are more paths than these). This is something you need some experience to get to and it is intentional.

The poor tend to stick to labor jobs that you can train any healthy person to do in a few weeks on the job.

A subset of the poor, perhaps. Aren't you generalizing too much? I think you're assuming too many behaviors from a word that simply means current lack of money. I would think that some portion of the poor if not most would be interested in long-term solutions to their problem.

Fresh college grads generally are poor but the term in this context is never used to describe their social class. We'd instead describe them as broke, as we expect they'll soon improve their lot. Poor hence obviously indicates the class for whom the probability of doing this is below average if not terrible. It's a probability on a collective not any rule applied to an individual

‘poor vs career-minded’ is a subconscious dog whistle. A sign of a cosmopolitan elite who consider the poor as being poor because they aren’t career-minded enough. Interesting phenomenon.

No they don’t. Most people in the US are getting married between 25-30 and there’s an entire community of women out there finding it difficult to find a man because social and economic trends have pushed the norm outwards and young men don’t want to marry hyper-selective women.

Have you spoken to anyone who dates these days? All the young men hate it. Women have all the leverage until they hit 28.