My two thoughts on this:<p>1. I bet a large portion of this phenomenon is related to the current US divorce laws (basically a woman with a child can divorce a high-income husband and claim a large portion of his income for child support &#x2F; maintenance).<p>Therefore marrying people of your &#x27;social circle&#x27; is a certain way to mitigate this effect (ie if your spouse is a high-level attorney rather than a secretary, you have a much lower risk of it happening to you).<p>2. Author kinda assumes the reader is an idiot in some places. For example: &quot;As it becomes harder for many people to “marry up”.<p>Well, no. &quot;People&quot; never really married up. Women with looks had a chance to marry men of higher social standing. The reverse (man marrying a woman of higher social standing) was very much an exception.<p>So basically what this means is that men of today are not as interested in marrying women beneath their social status as they were in the past.<p>I guess that women&#x27;s liberation had a lot to do with this phenomenon. If one is an intelligent woman, she can simply go to a good school and get a career - instead of her only choice in life being marriage to a rich man. So that actually sounds like a not terrible thing for such women.