Good News, Bad News

And the upper classes will propagate and the lower classes die out, the speed determined by the inverse size of the social safety net?

the impact of gender equality on family inequality could be quite large.

Why do you say "could"?

I think your explanation was dead on (if nothing more than the main thesis of "The Bell Curve"). Female empowerment and meritocricy multiply together to supercharge inequality.

The only flaw is the numbers, because the elite do not reproduce at the rate of replacement. Unless they establish a non-democratic government, they will be an ever shrinking part of the electorate.

The only flaw is the numbers, because the elite do not reproduce at the rate of replacement.

But that too plays into inequality. The only child of two doctors gets a cognative and financial advantage that is concentrated in that one person. The multiple offspring of a single mother crack whore are cognatively and financially disadvantaged, and it is spread over a lot more people.

I bet if we all think about this a little bit, we could come up with an equation to show this more clearly, and show how these multiple factors (female empowerment, meritocrisy, and birth rate) multiple together to cause inequality.

"[W]hen a man with high earnings potential starts to look for a wife with high earnings potential instead of a wife who can cook and clean, you are going to see fewer inter-class marriages."

Well a man could look for a wife with high earnings potential who is willing to just cook and clean.

I though this was already happening and was one factor in the past decades growth in inequality.

Look at the Census data on two earner families.
Since 1975 the median real income of two earner families increased 41.5% while the mean income rose 62.2%

see Mike Judge's movie Idiocracy for the opposite view of the future...