Let’s start with definitions. Polygamy = Marriage to more than one spouse. Polygyny = Marriage of a husband and more than one wife. Polyandry = Marriage of a wife and more than one husband. Group marriage = Polygamous compositions other than polygyny and polyandry. Hypergamy = Marriage into a superior class (‘marrying up’).
In 2007-2011, uncertainty about the constitutionality of Canada’s prohibition of polygamy prompted a reference case before the Supreme Court of British Columbia. Joseph Henrich, an anthropologist, submitted an affidavit, warning that legalization of polygyny would cause major harms:
“A non-trivial increase in the incidence of polygyny, which is quite plausible if polygyny were legalized given what we know about both male and female mating preferences, would result in increased crime and antisocial behaviour by the pool of unmarried males it would create.
Greater degrees of polygyny drive down the age of first marriage for (all) females on average, and increase the age gap between husbands and wives. This generally leads to females marrying before age 18, or being ‘promised’ in marriage prior to age 18.
Greater degrees of polygyny are associated with increased inequality between the sexes, and the relationship may be causal as men seek more control over women when women become scarce.
Polygynous men invest less in their offspring both because they have more offspring and because they continue to invest in seeking additional wives. This implies that, on average, children in a more polygynous society will receive less parental investment.
Greater degrees of polygynous marriage may reduce national wealth (GDP) per capita both because of the manner in which male efforts are shifted to obtaining more wives and because of the increase in female fertility.” (p. 3)
Henrich invokes all of the common rationales of prohibitions: Polygyny would cause harm to others (crime), self-harm (premature female marriage), inequality (spousal hierarchy), commodification (arranged marriages), and slippery slopes (less parental investment in each child, lower GDP per capita). Henrich perforce draws evidence about polygyny from societies that aren’t ‘WEIRD’ (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) because WEIRD societies prohibit polygyny. He speculates that transition to monogamy was a necessary cause of the development of modern society. (Compare similar arguments by Richard Posner against polygamy.)
The question arises: Would repeal of prohibition of polygamy in modern, WEIRD societies produce dynamics and outcomes like what Henrich discerns in the anthropology of non-WEIRD societies?
David Friedman paints a different picture because men and women ‘belong to themselves’ in modern societies. Parents don’t ‘arrange’ their offspring’s marriages, and don’t have property rights in them. By contrast, Henrich anachronistically assumes that females will be “‘promised’ in marriage prior to age 18.”
Friedman outlines the dynamics of polygamy in two simple models that include self-ownership. First, a model of a marriage market with prices:
“[… .] how can women possibly be made better off by polygyny and men by polyandry? That reaction reflects [ …] naive price theory. Naive price theory is the theory that prices do not change. If polygyny were introduced and nothing else changed, then it seems likely that women would be worse off—except for those who prefer to share the burden of putting up with a husband. But when polygyny is introduced, something else does change; the demand curve for wives shifts up, and so does the price for wives implicit in the marriage contract. Those wives who end up with one husband get him on more favorable terms—he must bid more for a wife because of the competition of his polygynous rivals. Those who accept polygynous marriages do so because the price they are offered is sufficient to at least balance, for them, the disadvantage of sharing a husband.”
Second, a simple model of matching without prices:
“The most desirable woman has her pick of mates, so she accepts the most desirable man; he, having his pick of mates, is only interested in her. The second most desirable woman […] settles for the second most desirable man. The process continues until all the members of whichever gender is less plentiful on the marriage market have been paired up, leaving the least desirable members of the other gender unmarried. Suppose we now introduce polygyny. The most attractive woman can no longer be certain of marrying the most attractive man. He may prefer two less attractive women—and they may each prefer half of him to all of a less attractive man. If fewer men than women want to get married, some women may be choosing half of a husband over the alternative of no husband at all. The result is no longer an unambiguous improvement from the standpoint of women, as it was in the first model. Some women at the top of the hierarchy find themselves with less attractive men than before. Neither is it an unambiguous worsening; some women who were previously unmarried may now have (half of) a husband, while others may get half of a man instead of all of a dolt. It may or may not be an unambiguous improvement for the men. Some men benefit by getting two wives instead of one. In addition, every time a man near the top of the hierarchy settles for two (lower quality) women instead of one (high-quality) one, he opens up a rung on the ladder; the men below him move up a step and end up with more desirable wives than they could have before. [… .] How can the change injure men? A man is worse off if someone above him marries two wives, both higher in the women’s hierarchy than the woman he was going to marry. That eliminates one step above him on the men’s ladder and two steps on the women’s, pushing his relative position down a step; he must be content with a woman one step below the one he could have gotten if monogamy were the rule.”
Alvin Roth echoes Friedman’s second model:
“legalizing certain kinds of voluntary transactions may change the terms of trade so as to disadvantage those who don’t wish to participate in them. [… .] for example, bans on polygamy might be understood as outlawing certain kinds of competition that would disadvantage some men and some women relative to the monogamous status quo, even while allowing others to engage in welfare-improving transactions.” (p. 11)
It should come as no surprise that repeal of prohibition of polygamy might be ambiguous from a utilitarian perspective. Major rule-changes that make nobody worse off—‘Pareto improvements’—are no mean feat. Should utilitarian ambiguity override a presumption of liberty in marriage?
(On a separate note, Roth also classifies polygamy as a repugnant transaction (p. 20).)
Alex Tabarrok identifies two countervailing mechanisms, which cast doubt on Henrich’s claim that “children in a more polygynous society will receive less parental investment:”
“It is true that to the extent that polygyny increases the number of any particular man’s children that his attention will be divided. But there are two counter effects. First, there is a selection effect. The men with more children will be the wealthier and healthier men–the better providers. [… .] Polygyny […] decreases the fertility of the polygynous woman […], thus the attention of mothers will increase.”
Gary Becker draws an analogy between prohibition of polygamy and discrimination in the labor market:
“The claim that polygyny is unfair to women is strange since polygyny increases the demand for women as spouses in the same way that polyandry would increase the demand for men. If men were to take multiple wives, that increases the overall competition for women compared to a situation where each man can have at most one wife. This argument against polygyny is like arguing that a way to increase the economic prospects of minorities is to place an upper bound on how many members of these groups a company can employ.”
Unlike Henrich, Becker predicts that polygyny won’t spread:
“polygyny would be rare in modern societies even if fully allowed. […] the main motivation for polygyny has vanished with the arrival of the knowledge economy where fathers as well as mothers now want a small number of educated children rather than many ill-educated offspring.”
Bryan Caplan concurs: “Not much would change if you legalized gay marriage or polygamy; they’re just niche markets.” Elsewhere, he elaborates:
“you’re most likely to see polygamy arise in places where the supply of women is high relative to demand. To take an extreme example, if half the male population dies in a war, the price of women is going to be low. This encourages polygamy, which partially mitigates the damage for women.”
Posner, however, disagrees about prevalence, too:
“I am not sure that it would be all that uncommon. Although few American couples want to have more than two or three children, a polygamous union is not a couple. If a couple has three children, the ratio of adults to children is 2:3. In a polygamous household consisting of a husband, two wives, and four children, the ratio of adults to children is higher: 3:4. So the per-parent burden is less, even though there are more children.”
Let’s take a closer look at whether a (hypothetical) substantial increase in prevalence of polygamy under legality would be bad. As Thomas Sowell likes to reminds us, one always must ask: Compared to what? Consider current prevalence of multiple partner fertility (MPF)—having children with more than one partner—in the United States. In a groundbreaking study, Lindsay Monte finds:
“Multiple partner fertility is not a new phenomenon, but it is only in recent years that social science data have become inclusive enough to permit its study. (p. 1) The most fundamental finding is that MPF is quite common. […] more than a quarter of families with minor children have multiple partner fertility. (p. 10) […] one or both parents has MPF in 44 percent of cohabiting families. (p. 5) MPF mothers and fathers enter parenthood earlier than average. (p. 8) The majority of MPF parents transition into MPF at the second child. (p. 8) […] only 4.5 percent of MPF fathers live with all of their biological children. (p. 8) […] fathers’ involvement with [their children of a first relationship] plummets when they have a child or children in a new union. […] (p. 2) MPF mothers are a disproportionately large proportion of never married mothers (28.9 percent) compared to the proportion of MPF fathers among never married fathers (19.2 percent). (p. 8) Even net of controls for sex, race, age, origin, educational attainment, and children ever born, MPF parents are still more likely to live in households below the poverty line than are either all parents or all adults. (p. 7) MPF also means that custodial parents are likely relying on child support from absent parents, and child support is a less efficient means of economic support than a shared household budget. (p. 7) […] 22.4 percent of MPF mothers live in households below the poverty line. (p. 9) […] the exclusion of the incarcerated portion of the ‘institutionalized’ population may result in an undercount of the true level of MPF, particularly for men. (p. 9)”
One is reminded of Charles Murray’s portrait of Fishtown. Monte’s findings indicate that most of the pathologies, which Henrich fears from legal polygamy, are present here and now, like caricatures, as correlates of adverse forms of multiple partner fertility on a major scale amidst a regime of prescribed monogamy. Therefore, we should compare a hypothetical substantial prevalence of legal polygamy to massive, chaotic, ‘illegal,’ de facto polygyny and polyandry without contract and without commitment. The pragmatic question, then, is: Would legal polygamy provide a cohesive, constructive substitute for adverse forms of multiple partner fertility?
And there is pathology in Murray’s Belmont, too. For example, Friedman describes a wife’s vulnerability to opportunistic breach and serial polygamy by men in bourgeois monogamy:
“A couple marries. For the next twenty years, the wife is bearing and rearing children—a more than full-time job, as those who have tried it can attest. The husband supports the couple, but not very well, since he is still in the early stages of his career. Finally the children are old enough to be only a part-time job and the wife can start living the life of leisure that she has earned. The husband gets promoted to vice-president. He divorces his wife and marries a younger woman.”
Would polygamy, by reconciling serial loves and established commitments, domesticate the husband, who otherwise would engage in opportunistic breach?
Becker postulates contractual protections for the first wife:
“What about a first wife who suddenly finds out that her husband is planning on taking additional wives? She could divorce him, share their property, and receive child support for any children they have in virtually all states without having to prove any ‘fault’ on his part. Moreover, she could write a contract before marriage stipulating that he cannot take additional wives. The contract could provide for damages In the event of a divorce due such a violation of the contract.”
Unlike Henrich, Elizabeth Brake notes that philosophers question whether polygyny would empower men to exert greater control over women:
“oppressiveness does not cleanly distinguish monogamous from polygamous relationships. […] if a polygamous ‘sister wife,’ for instance, has the legal right to marry outside the existing marriage, there is no structural inequality.”
Unlike Henrich, Arnold Kling fears not polygamy itself, but a combustible psychology of envy and jealousy around polygamy and inequality:
“My hypothesis is that the irrational resentment that many men feel over the high pay of CEO’s and others can be traced to a deep-seated fear that some other man will wind up with more than his share of mates, and the rest of us will be left with none. The last thing we need is to turn that unconscious fear into something that is consciously justifiable.”
Robin Hanson contends that such envy about male sexual inequality doesn’t explain prohibition of polygamy:
“So yes, banning polygamy could be part of a larger coherent strategy to reduce male sexual inequality, to resist natural female hypergamy. But banning polygamy and also polyandry and prostitution, while allowing lesbian relations and preventing natural punishment of wife affairs, well that looks nothing like a coherent strategy to reduce male sexual inequality. We should look elsewhere to explain our pattern of what we ban and what we allow.”
Hanson’s answer is that prohibitions are exercises of prestige and dominance:
“It seems to me pretty obvious that we prohibit polygamy mainly because the folks who want to do it (rural religious communes) have low status in our society. Also, since high status folks cheat and don’t want that discouraged via blackmail, we prohibit blackmail. Yes there is an element of inertia, but gays have overcome such inertia in ways that polygamists can’t. Gays are common in high status communities and professions; for our elites, many of their best friends really are gay. Not at all true for polygamists.”
Let’s conclude with a contrast between philosophy and economics. Philosopher Michael Huemer writes:
“What areas are most ripe for ethical revision? The area of sexual morality is probably the clearest case, since it is an area in which common moral attitudes exhibit multiple signs of unreliability.”
By contrast, Tabarrok elucidates the political economy of prohibition with an arresting twist:
“Polygyny will be bad for poor men who lose out in the competition for first wives to rich men who are on their second. […] On the whole, therefore, I see no strong arguments that banning polygamy (either polygyny or polyandry) is socially optimal but due to the power of the patriarchy I don’t expect polygyny to be approved of in the United States any time soon.”
The next post will be about drug prohibition. If you would like background readings, I recommend essays by Jon Elster about addiction and by James Leitzel about potential regulations (exclusion and buyer licensing).
John Alcorn is Principal Lecturer in Formal Organizations, Shelby Cullom Davis Endowment, Trinity College, Connecticut.
READER COMMENTS
Fred
Sep 28 2019 at 2:44pm
In 1890 the LDS religion rejected polygyny. It’s my understanding that this was done due to external pressure rather than any perceived internal concerns. What good/bad things happened in Utah following this change? I don’t want to undervalue the ideas of the many smart people that are quoted in this posting, but no matter how ingeniously they make their hypotheses referencing what actually happened in a real situation would be illuminating.
John Alcorn
Sep 28 2019 at 5:35pm
Prohibition of polygamy was a requirement for western territories to become States. Changes (good/bad) wrought by prohibition must be disentangled from changes (good/bad) wrought by statehood.
There are special challenges to historical inquiry about prohibited behaviors (‘underground’ behaviors).
Prohibitions typically have ‘selection effects’ (changes in the demographic composition of participants). See Robin Hanson’s observation in my blogpost.
It seems that before prohibition, prevalence of polygamy among Mormons ranged up to 25%. David Bitton & Val Lambson estimate demographic limits of 19th-century Mormon polygamy:
It is notable that prevalence polygamy was substantial, even though there wasn’t a shortage of men in sex ratios on the frontier and among Mormons. Kathryn Daynes reports that the adult male/female sex ratio in Utah in 1890 was 1.12. However, the sex ratio among non-Mormons, who constituted 20% of Utah’s population, was quite skewed towards males. Therefore, we may speculate that the sex ratio among Mormons was approximately balanced. Utah frontier demographics don’t square with the the demographics in Bryan Caplan’s “extreme example.” But does the frontier count as “modern society”?
Daynes’ book is a careful history of marriage practices in Manti, a town in central Utah, before and after prohibition of polygamy (1840-1910).
Samuel Bazzi & co-authors provide a fascinating analysis of frontier culture and sex ratios in U.S. history.
Joseph E Munson
Sep 28 2019 at 10:06pm
One interesting bad thing, is that the women could more easily divide labor and had more free time under Mormon polygamy.
It’s also interesting that women got the vote in the Utah territory, though it had to be eventually given up for statehood.
A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870, is a good read. Polygamy is associated with having a backwards attitudes towards women, because, right now, on average people who are polygamous have a backwards attitude toward women, but this was not always the case.
Also, officially according to Mormons, God told J.S that Mormons should stop practicing polygamy, it had nothing to do outside pressure, because God doesn’t bow to outside pressure.
Of course secular historians and none believers have somewhat of a different take..
Fred
Sep 29 2019 at 3:17pm
Thanks for your reply. I have visited Nauvoo where the LDS resided before violence drove them out. The homes of the leading patriarchs are very impressive. They must have been wealthy. Did sharing of household duties give the wives opportunities for profitable jobs?
Joseph E Munson
Oct 2 2019 at 2:22am
As far as I know, back then Utah was relatively more sexist than its contemporaries, I doubt it gave that all that much more opportunity to work for themselves, but at least they didn’t have to do as much house work.
Yet, it was also less sexist in that women could vote, so, I don’t really know what to make of it, quite strange (I suppose this probably increased the voting power of the rich husbands, assuming they could control their wives vote).
Peter
Sep 28 2019 at 3:23pm
So let me start off with saying thank you on the post. Not so much about the content itself but more along the lines it’s one of the better long factor narratives I’ve seen on this blog in awhile and I applaud you for that.
Outside that I want to say I often find discussion such as this amusing as it’s basically discussing “things that can not be spoke about in polite society though we all know is true”. To quote a Moldovan “fifth wife” former-harem member I knew when we were talking about how she ended up in London (she was thirty by then) “Better a sixteen year old sex toy for a fat seventy year old British man who beat me everyday with a belt for ten years as part of his harem after a hard day of (her) hanging around the pool drinking and doing coke than the first/only wife of a forty year old peasant farmer who beats me every day with his fist drunk (him) after I spend the day grueling away in the farm fields and afterwards housework. He died, I’m now a British citizen and got a million pounds. When alternate farmer husband dies from alcoholism in his fifties and I would have been left with a bunch of kids, a hovel, debt, and no future prospect as there is no interest for a divorced mother past her prime worn for tear among the local market. Both suck, one sucks less and one has a vastly better upside.”. And this attitude is born out when it comes to Western de facto polygyny when it comes to acceptance of infidelity inside the marriage where the “legal” wife is effectively the first wife and as long as the second/third/fourth wives know their place the marriage can keep going, i.e. “don’t make it public and don’t bring it home”. If we are being honest here, it’s generally not the infidelity that causes the divorce when it comes to male infidelity, it’s the second wife attempting to usurg the first wife in reputation or resources OR the law/culture not allowing for the husband to put his first wife to pasture / sequester her and still provide marriage legal protections to his new wife.
People often forget in places with legal polygyny there is usually strong legal and cultural protections for the wives when it comes to the husband duty to provide (we would call it marital support in the US which I believe all fifty-states still mandate though it rarely comes up) and draconian penalties in divorce to the point it’s often easier to just set them up for life far away. People often confuse “Big Love” and Mormon trailer trash with the reality of how polygyny works in the the more accurate and general case of historical or modern harems.
Legal harems are the natural norm of human existence, it’s just bad for social unrest and hence the age old problem of “it can only exist until the people discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury” that haunts for libertarian utopias.
Kurt Schuler
Sep 29 2019 at 6:07pm
Because it is women who bear children, polgyny has been and is far more common than polyandry. So, one man and four wives, for instance. The social status of men is greater than the social status of women in such societies, because one man is worth four women on this reckoning. At least, the right kind of man is worth four women. Depending on how common polygyny is, the “bachelor herd” of men who wan’t to marry but can’t find wives may be large, posing a problem both for them and for their society, since young, dissatisfied men are the most violent segment of the population.
The discussion in the other posts is entirely theoretical or about Mormon history, so here’s something much more from current headlines that offers food for thought:
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190126-tunisia-women-call-for-polygamy/
Lorenzo from Oz
Sep 29 2019 at 10:34pm
Polygyny:
(1) intensifies marital competition among males (since they remain in the marriage market),
(2) redistributes more brides to high status/high income men,
(3) provides more women with marital access to high status/high income men (there are probably lots of women who would be happy to be Bill Gates’s nth wife),
(4) creates post-marital competition among such wives,
(5) raises the marital value of women (hence dowers, bride prices and bride wealth),
(6) lowers the status of women (as elite women typically share an elite male, so have lower status, and are inhibited from networking by their internal competition in elite households), and
(7) easily motivates male predatory behavior against outgroups (to increase chances of grabbing a wife, either directly or by increasing one’s wealth/status). If males become sufficiently out of contention, the in-group they are excluded from becomes an out-group to target.
Also permitting polyandry can ameliorate these effects but is not likely to eliminate them. Polyandry generally makes sense if:
(1) there is a need to stop an inherited production unit from falling below a minimum size,
(2) the efforts of more than one adult male are otherwise needed to sustain the household, or
(3) to compensate for the distribution of brides to high status/high income men.
Good luck with the notion that modern societies are so different, these effects won’t happen.
Map polygyny in the modern world with political instability in the modern world. The effects are revealing.
John Alcorn
Sep 30 2019 at 8:57am
Lorenzo,
Re: “Good luck with the notion that modern societies are so different, these effects won’t happen. Map polygyny in the modern world with political instability in the modern world. The effects are revealing.”
By “modern society,” I mean something like what Joseph Henrich (anthropologists) call WEIRD society. What you call “the modern world” (my emphasis) includes non-WEIRD societies, a subset of which are the main locus of legal polygyny today. Some have low prevalence of polygyny, but nonetheless political instability. What Arnold Kling calls causal density makes me agnostic about your thesis.
A related empirical question: Why doesn’t widespread multiple partner fertility (MFP), i.e., de facto polygyny and polyandry without contract and with little commitment, cause political instability in the U.S. (or in other WEIRD societies)?
My intuition is that legalization of polygamy might be a leap in the dark in modern society. The question, then, is whether the precautionary principle ought to determine the decision, in favor of the status quo (prohibition). David Friedman argues that the precautionary principle is a “pseudoscientific slogan.”
Daniel Klein
Sep 30 2019 at 10:06am
Adam Smith says quite a bit about polygamy in the Lectures on Jurisprudence. He comes across as glad of its prohibition, historically considered, and explains why. He also indicates that the prohibition is a violation of (commutative) justice.
In the printed volume, see 150-9, 160-1, 166, 167, 171, 172, 173, 442-5, 448, 449.
John Alcorn
Oct 1 2019 at 9:28am
Thanks for the pointer!
John Alcorn
Oct 1 2019 at 11:41am
Upon inspection, Adam Smith’s discussion of polygyny concerns history of (large) harems in pre-modern despotic societies, wherein plural wives lack self-ownership and lack property rights. There is much analysis of the special role of eunuchs in pre-modern polygyny.
Smith also identifies political mechanism:
Smith sketches complex mechanisms whereby monogamy indirectly serves as (a) a check on royal tyranny and (b) an advantage in military conflict with pre-modern polygynous societies.
The question remains, Would repeal of prohibition of polygamy in modern, WEIRD societies produce dynamics and outcomes like what Smith and Henrich and discern in their analyses of pre-modern and non-WEIRD societies?
nobody.really
Sep 30 2019 at 11:16am
G. K. Chesterton
Alcorn offers many thoughtful observations. I note, however, that his analysis focuses on the benefits and harm to individuals or, at most, to groups within society (men vs. women, high-status vs. low status). He doesn’t address rivalries between societies. This seems consistent with a libertarian focus on individuals, and skepticism about societies.
Polygamy/polygyny are practices that grant greater discretion to high-status men. These practices were observed in pretty much every society known. Yet the practice was abandoned throughout nationals that would eventually become developed nations.
Why? What would cause high-status men to surrender this kind of discretion?
Maybe prohibitions on polygamy are outdated, designed to address concerns that no longer obtain. But until we know why this gate was erected across the road in the first place, I feel reluctant to tear it down.
John Alcorn
Sep 30 2019 at 8:52pm
Yes, Chesterton’s eloquent injunction should give us pause. This is the rub between conservatives and libertarians.
Thorny questions:
Given that causal explanation is the weakest link in historical inquiry, can we know, with confidence, ‘why the gate was erected across the road’? Should we assume that the gate must be (or have been) useful? Or is such an assumption unwarranted ‘functionalism,’ as if societies were biological organisms?
Did abolitionists “see the use of” slavery? Suffragettes, the use of restricted franchise? Civil rights activists, the use of segregation?
nobody.really
Oct 1 2019 at 12:08am
Uh … yeah…? The use of slavery was to get labor done cheaper. The use of segregation was to ensure that societal resources were directed to those in power, and to their families, and to limit the circumstances under which those in power have to confront poverty and suffering. The benefits of these policies to those in power seem pretty straightforward, and I expect abolitionists and civil rights activists could see those benefits clearly. Is this a trick question or something?
(Aside: What was the use of extending the franchise only to men? That’s less obvious, because men tend to have women among their heirs. I’d guess this restriction has to do with the nature of democratic evolution. Magna Carta struck a blow for democracy because, even if the policy extended benefits only to aristocrats, it was a greater step toward decentralization than the French or German aristocrats had achieved. And ever step in democracy has been similar, extending voting rights incrementally–and never totally.
Contrary to libertarian sentiments, I conclude that the traditional focus of society has been the tribe, not the individual. Thus we observed in the original post people discussing arranged marriages, dowries, bride prices, etc. I surmise that voters were understood to act not on the basis of their private, egocentric views, but as agents for their families. And because we can observe no systemic bias in the percentage of women in each family, granting voting rights to women would be seen as simply doubling the administrative burdens of running an election without creating any systemic change in the electoral outcome.
But I’m just spit-balling here.)
IN CONTRAST, I’ll ask again: What caused those in power to adopt a policy restricting their own discretion to take multiple wives? The appeal of this policy to those in power is nowhere near as obvious as the appeal of slavery or segregation.
I make no assumption that societies are biological organisms. But I do believe in natural selection: Adaptive practices are more likely to endure that maladaptive ones. If computer simulations demonstrate that a Tit-for-Tat strategy tends to predominate over other strategies in repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma games, do we conclude that the computer is treating this competition as a biological organism? Or do we conclude that the computer simply observes which strategies seem most adaptive?
History has seen many cultures. If developed cultures all share a similar trait, that gives cause for reflection.
I concede, I can’t say for sure that anti-bigamy laws/culture are adaptive; their prevalence might be random, or an artifact of some other variable. But I see cause for reflection.
That said, we may get to see some natural experiments on this matter. Many nations (especially China) find themselves with more men than women. Thus, we may get to observe what happens when societies find themselves with a lot of unmarried men. Stay tuned….
John Alcorn
Oct 1 2019 at 6:28am
Mine were thorny questions, not trick questions! I know from EconLog and AskBlog that you read widely and think hard about the issues.
Chesterton’s injunction—Tell me the use of the gate before you destroy it—seems to expect an answer acceptable also to those who benefit by the gate. But let’s say that answers like, ‘The gate serves those in power,’ suffice before tearing down the gate. This seems to fit your discussion of abolition and desegregation.
Then Robin Hanson’s answer—’Prohibitions of polygamy and of blackmail jointly serve those in power’—would meet the Chesterton criterion. But then we’re back to Alex Tabarrok’s political economy: the majority, driven by low-status men, want the gate.
Joseph Henrich’s explanation of the advent of polygamy emphasizes group benefits and cultural emulation (by other groups).
nobody.really
Oct 1 2019 at 10:07am
I understand Chesterton to simply argue against acting out of ignorance. We should FIRST strive to understand the purpose of a tradition, and THEN decide whether to abandon them. The point of policy analysis is to avoid stepping on people’s toes accidentally; we want to reassure you that we have carefully weighed all the options before we chose to step on your toes. But often, optimal policy entails stepping on toes.
Yet Hanson doesn’t really make that argument. Rather, Hanson argues that those in power might be INDIFFERENT to polygamy because they don’t want to practice it. They might also be indifferent to square dancing, yet they don’t ban the practice. So Hanson’s argument doesn’t really address the issue. (Moreover, Hanson neglects to explain why those in power would NOT have an interest in defending their interest in taking multiple wives–for example, those in power in Ancient Greece.)
And by implication, those in power felt the need to placate this majority–or, at least, the low-status men who might otherwise cause trouble. And this strikes me as a relevant consideration for today.
Indeed it does. Again, this strikes me as a relevant consideration for today.
nobody.really
Sep 30 2019 at 12:21pm
Huh?
1: Why would patriarchy favor laws that constrict the discretion of high-status men?
2: From where does Tabarrok think patriarchy derives its power? I’ll offer a conjecture: ‘CUZ DUDES WHO DON’T GET WHAT THEY WANT WILL BEAT YOU UP. At the risk of trafficking in sexist generalizations, women are less likely to do that. Thus, where the interests of men conflict with the interests of women, it makes sense to design public policy to pander to the men.
I understand how this argument offends people’s sense of egalitarianism; it offends mine. If someone has a different understanding of patriarchy, I’d like to hear it. But otherwise, I fear we ignore this dynamic at our peril.
nobody.really
Sep 30 2019 at 12:52pm
On inequitable social policy:
As Ramsey observed in 1927 (regarding taxation) and Boiteux in 1956 (regarding natural monopolies), where the choice of public policy will result in different allocations of benefits and burdens among social groups, policy makers will want to consider each group’s elasticity of demand—and, more generally, each group’s options for reacting to the reallocation. A socially optimal strategy often entails placing relatively larger burdens on people will fewer/less harmful options. This often means burdening the poor/weak at the expense of the rich/strong.
Thus, if you need to raise revenues, it may make more sense to raise taxes on labor (which faces a larger burden to relocate to another jurisdiction) than on capital (which can relocate to a foreign jurisdiction with a few keystrokes).
Or if you want to encourage people to join the military, you may want to laud the rich recruits (that is, people who had many alternatives) more than the poor (people who faced fewer alternatives). The two groups may face identical perils in uniform, but they made different sacrifices before they donned the uniform.
Likewise, if you are designing public policy that will result in more frustrated men or more frustrated women, it may make sense to pander to the men—because we anticipate that men may engage in more antisocial reactions than women.
Again, I make no defense of the egalitarianism of these policy choices—only of their strategic value. Arguably, optimal public policy may involve choices that burden some groups inequitably under some circumstances, but with compensatory policies elsewhere. Alas, such social arrangements can fall prey to narrowly focused policy analysts who analyze each part of a policy in isolation and fail to recognize broader social dynamics.
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