Читать книгу Wealth - Yuval Elmelech - Страница 27

Wealth plays a part in some of the most important decisions that couples make, including marriage entry and timing, and also contributes to child well-being and life chances. Both qualitative and quantitative studies in the US have found that couples consider assets and accumulated wealth in the form of savings, homeownership, or car ownership as essential prerequisites to marriage (Schneider 2011; Edin and Kefalas 2005; Smock et al. 2005).

Edin and Reed (2005: 117–137) find support for the financial expectations and family formation theory, suggesting that, in addition to employment and earnings, contemporary marital expectations have expanded to include the prospect of financial security through asset ownership and net worth (Gibson-Davis 2009). A participant in Edin and Kefalas’s (2005) study expressed precisely these sentiments, emphasizing her need for economic security as a prerequisite to marriage:

I’m not gonna just get into marrying him and not have my own house! not have a job! … If we got a divorce, that would be my house. I bought that house, he can’t kick me out or he can’t take my kids from me … I know a lot of people that happened to. I don’t want it to happen to me. (Quoted in Edin and Kefalas 2005: 471)

Schneider’s (2011) quantitative research supports the finding that accumulated wealth is a strong predictor of entry into marriage, concluding that the total value or net worth of the tangible and financial assets owned by a couple is a strong predictor of the decision to get married. A recent study found that, for Americans over the age of 60, being wealthy reduces the likelihood of separation among married couples and increases the likelihood of men’s transition to marriage among cohabiting couples (Vespa 2013).

The positive effect of a family’s wealth and asset ownership on child well-being has been broadly ascertained. Even when various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics have been controlled for, parental wealth status is important for such outcomes as high school graduation, college attendance, and teenage pregnancy (see Grinstein-Weiss et al. 2014). A study on secondary school students in Italy showed that parental homeownership and debt (mortgages) had positive and negative effects, respectively, on students’ reported levels of life satisfaction (Becchetti and Pisani 2014).

Children’s educational attainment—often viewed as a form of cultural capital on account of the social status associated with it and of the technical competence and skills (human capital) it entails (see Lareau and Weininger 2003)—has been consistently linked to parental wealth. Parents with a sufficient amount of wealth adopt various strategies to improve the life chances of their children. In the US, where property taxes are used to finance local public schools, parental wealth influences children’s schooling both directly, through payments for tutors and enrichment programs, and indirectly, through the association between the price of real estate in a given area and the amount of local property taxes available to fund local schools. Consequently household wealth emerges as a critical factor in determining the neighborhoods in which the parents of school-age children reside and, accordingly, the quality of the public education their children receive. Johnson (2006) coined the term “wealth privilege” to describe this intergenerational transmission of advantages, from economic capital to cultural and human capital. For young adults, parental wealth continues to be a formative factor in educational attainment, shaping access to post-secondary education, particularly the transition from high school to college (Conley 2001), occupational attainment, and asset ownership (Henretta 1984; Blanchflower and Oswald 1998; Holtz-Eakin et al. 1994; Spilerman 2004).