Assortative Mating and Income Inequality
28th December 2015
Cowen rather coyly overlooks another aspect of the assortative mating that takes place at universities: The heritability of intelligence. Men and women now tend to look for partners who are at least as smart as they are and they tend to pass along their smarts to their children. A 2015 study reports that assortative mating correlates more with intelligence than for any other trait.
If they have kids, which a lot of them don’t; or at most one. I know at least one couple who are each only children and have only one child (and probably won’t have another). Sure, that kid will be highly intelligent but might not reproduce at all.