The Economist.
Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Blaw.
And I'm Jason Palmer.
Today on the show, could Red Bull have its wings clipped?
And trophy wives may finally be going out of fashion.
But first,
Having a trophy wife has long been a mainstay of American popular culture.
Just think of the cigar-smoking ad execs of Mad Men, or Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.
Wealthy men wanted to adorn themselves with young, glamorous women.
But change may be on its way.
The age of the trophy wife seems to be over.
Doug Dowson is a data journalist.
So we looked at a sample of married couples in the census data
and we actually only looked at heterosexual married couples
because the data just aren't available for these kinds of historical analyses.
We saw that in 1980, about 8% of the top earners,
so those are people in the top 1% of the income,
married someone at least a decade younger, compared to just 5% of men earning typical wages.
By 2024, that gap had closed.
The richest group behaved just like the rest of us.