Makes perfect sense. Women want to have children with men whom they respect, and no woman respects a man who makes less than her.

We are adapted to an evolutionary environment where men had more social and economic power than women. Any man who was weaker or poorer than a woman was self-evidently unworthy of reproducing with. Women evolved to ignore the losers and only have children with men of higher status than themselves. Since our programming hasn’t changed, gender egalitarianism blocks off a large portion of the male population from reproduction, and more fundamentally, respect.

Robin Hanson has several good pieces on how humans evaluate most things (quality of life, social status, wealth, etc) in relative rather than absolute terms. I think that’s related.

Also hilarious how Germany keeps increasing its reparations to Israel.