Doug Dowson

speaker

89 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Doug Dowson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Taking the shine off: albedo and global temperatures · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

And when that was posed to Americans a couple of years ago, only ten percent said

Yes.

And that was actually one of the lowest shares in any country that was surveyed.

So on paper.

Americans seem to be really comfortable with this idea of women in relationships out earning

their male partners.

But when you dig into the data and you look at

the dynamics in actual relationships, you see that they seem to be a lot less comfortable with this concept than they actually claim in these surveys.

So there was a study done about a decade ago by an economist at the University of Chicago and she looked at married couples in America and she looked at the distribution of couples by how much the wife contributed to the household income.

And what you would expect is that

this distribution would be a normal distribution, kind of a bell shape.

And in fact what she found was that

When you look at the midpoint where

the women in the relationship would start to out earn their husbands, there was a big drop.

So what that suggested was that American wives are not very comfortable telling the Census Bureau that they out-earn their husband.

And the husbands that are surveyed are similarly not comfortable saying that their wives make more money than them.

So instead of seeing this kind of very smooth relationship, there was a big discontinuity, a big drop.

suggesting that American couples aren't that comfortable with this idea of the female breadwinner.

So when you look at the research on this subject, you see that while Americans have fairly egalitarian opinions on this, when they're actually in a relationship where there's a female breadwinner, it seems to more often cause problems than with relationships with a male breadwinner.

So these traditional norms are

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