Skip to Content News Archives Economy Energy Oil & Gas Renewables Electric Vehicles Mining Commodities Agriculture Real Estate Mortgages Mortgage Rates Finance Banking Insurance Fintech Cryptocurrency Work Wealth Smart Money Wealth Management Investor Personal Finance Family Finance Retirement Taxes High Net Worth FP Comment Executive Women Puzzmo Newsletters Financial Times Business Essentials More Innovation Information Technology FP500 Podcasts Small Business Lives Told Tails Told Shopping Financial Post Store Obituaries Place a Notice Advertising Advertising With Us Advertising Solutions Postmedia Ad Manager Sponsorship Requests Classifieds Place a Classifieds ad Working Profile Settings My Subscriptions Saved Articles My Offers Newsletters Customer Service FAQ News Economy Energy Mining Real Estate Finance Work Wealth Investor FP Comment Executive Women Puzzmo Newsletters Financial Times Business Essentials HomeFP CommentWilliam Watson: Is 'wed thy neighbour' a problem for policy?A U.S. study finds people tend to marry people who live close by and are from the same race and income groupLast updated 1 hour ago You can save this article by registering for free here. Or sign-in if you have an account.If much inequality is from such a commonplace occurrence as people marrying people like themselves, inequality is a lot less a capitalist ogre than it’s usually made out to be. Photo by MarchMeena29/Getty ImagesAt the heart of Christianity is the imperative “Love thy neighbour.” It doesn’t actually say “Wed thy neighbour” — though if you love them “in the Biblical sense” (nudge-nudge), you’re supposed to marry them. But if you love your neighbour in the generic Christian sense, i.e., “as you love yourself,” feeling full human-to-human empathy for them, marriage isn’t actually required.Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Exclusive articles from Barbara Shecter, Joe O'Connor, Gabriel Friedman, and others.Daily content from Financial Times, the world's leading global business publication.Unlimited online access to read articles from Financial Post, National Post and 15 news sites across Canada with one account.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles, including the New York Times Crossword.Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Exclusive articles from Barbara Shecter, Joe O'Connor, Gabriel Friedman and others.Daily content from Financial Times, the world's leading global business publication.Unlimited online access to read articles from Financial Post, National Post and 15 news sites across Canada with one account.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles, including the New York Times Crossword.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one account.Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments.Enjoy additional articles per month.Get email updates from your favourite authors.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one accountShare your thoughts and join the conversation in the commentsEnjoy additional articles per monthGet email updates from your favourite authorsSign In or Create an AccountorWhat prompts this reflection is a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., called “Who marries whom? The role of segregation by race and class.” It’s by Benjamin Goldman, Jamie Gracie and Sonya Porter of, respectively, Cornell, Harvard and the U.S. Census Bureau.Get the latest headlines, breaking news and columns.By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.The next issue of Top Stories will soon be in your inbox.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againThe three researchers are interested in “homophily.” Hemophilia is the blood disorder. Homophily is the sociological tendency of people who are similar to associate with each other. As applied to marriage, “homophily” is sometimes referred to, not very illuminatingly, as “assortative mating” — people tending to marry people like themselves. Is that because they prefer people like themselves or because they’re more likely to meet people like themselves? Hard to say but, either way, people with similar educations and incomes tending to marry causes the distribution of family incomes to be more unequal than if people intermixed as in the movies “Pretty Woman (1990),” “My Fair Lady (1964)” and other rags-weds-riches stories.Of course, if much inequality is from such a commonplace occurrence as people marrying people like themselves, inequality is a lot less a capitalist ogre than it’s usually made out to be. Especially if it turns out much of the sorting occurs because people tend to marry their geographic neighbours — which they do.Goldman, Gracie and Porter use linked U.S. census and tax data to examine the marital status at age 30 of Americans born 1980-87, so during the years 2010-17.They find that even in the sophisticated, tolerant 21st-century people do marry people from the same race and “class” — measuring class, no doubt imperfectly, by parents’ income. Only 2.1 per cent of Black Americans that age were married to a white spouse, while only 3.1 per cent of people whose parents were in the bottom quartile of income (averaging $15,010 in 2015 U.S. dollars) were married to people from the top quartile (US$136,400).But it turns out that’s largely because people tend to marry people who live close by. The researchers establish this using “census tract” data. A census tract is an area with about 4,000 residents. There were almost 75,000 such tracts in the U.S. in 2010. Five years before they married, two-thirds of the couples in the researchers’ sample lived within 50 census tracts of one another. That sounds like a lot. After all, 50 tracts of 4,000 people each is 200,000 people, which could require a lot of speed dating. But 200,000 people is only 0.07 per cent of the U.S. population. So Americans are a lot closer to “wed thy neighbour” than “wed thy generic fellow American.”And the probabilities fall sharply with distance: “Marrying someone from the same childhood census tract is 10 times more likely than marrying someone from the 50th closest tract, typically just a few miles away.” You might think online dating — “now the primary way couples meet” — would change that. After all, we read of people meeting online who live thousands and thousands of miles apart and end up together. In fact, dating apps “often require users to specify a search radius, with many restricting searches to their own neighbourhoods.”But if neighbourhoods tend to be clusters of similar people, people marrying locally reinforces like-marrying-like. And people do cluster. Looking at the 50 nearest census tracts, the researchers find — after a truly mind-boggling amount of calculation — that the average low-income family lived where 30.8 per cent of their 200,000 “neighbours” were also low-income and only 19.2 per cent top-quartile. But for the average high-income family, 34.2 per cent of neighbours were high-income, only 19.2 per cent low-income. So, despite the movies, low-income women are more likely to meet low-income men, and the same for high-income men and women.As for race, “White children live in neighbourhoods that are 75.6 per cent white and just 10.8 per cent Black,” whereas Black children’s neighbours are 40.5 per cent Black and 43.9 per cent white. Canadian readers will assume this country’s nrelationeighbourhoods are much less segregated. I don’t have the data but I very much doubt it.In any case, if you think assortative mating is a problem, what do you do about it? Force people of marriage age to move to faraway neighbourhoods? Start mandatory redistributive mating, courtesy the Minister of Matchmaking?The problem with data is that if you give interventionists even a little, they run with it for miles. Join the Conversation This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.