The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [40]
Polygamy can be problematic. It can entrench poverty, diverting productive capital into the bridal market. It encourages men to have large numbers of children, reducing the resources available to invest in their education. One study suggested that banning the practice in Africa would lead to a 40 percent drop in fertility, a 70 percent increase in national savings, and a 170 percent increase in economic output per head. But that doesn’t mean polygamy is worse for women than, say, monogamy.
Across human history, the world has remained mostly a patriarchal place. Both in polygamous and monogamous societies, sons typically carry the bloodline and inherit the family property. Daughters marry into their husband’s family and name. Still, there are important differences. In polygamous societies the male-to-female ratio is tilted in women’s favor. So women have a chance of mating above their station. In monogamous cultures, lower-quality women are reduced to mating with lower-quality men. As the American anthropologist Laura Betzig once said, “Which woman would not rather be John Kennedy’s third wife than Bozo the Clown’s first?”
Bride prices, of course, are rarely paid to the brides; payment is usually made to their parents, who often turn around and use them to purchase brides for their sons. Yet even in the most patriarchal cultures, parents who expect to get cash for their daughters are likely to appreciate them more. Theodore Bergstrom, an economist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, developed an economic model of polygamy that concluded that when families use the money they get from marrying off their daughters to buy brides for their sons, a family with at least one son would gain more grandchildren if its additional children were daughters. This makes women valuable.
In many monogamous societies, daughters often represent nothing but a cost. Bride prices are rare among them. Instead, they feature dowries, payments from the family of the bride to the groom that are virtually unheard of in polygamous cultures. That’s probably why many traditional monogamous societies have been prone to female infanticide and feticide.
Polygamy faded over the past two thousand years, first in Europe and then across much of the world, pushed by European colonial expansion. But it doesn’t seem to have been due to the opposition of women. The more likely reason is that men turned against it. One theory posits that economic development fostered monogamy because of the way it changed the reproductive goals of rich men. In less developed societies where wealth was mostly inherited, it made no sense to invest in educating one’s children. The purpose of mating was to have as many children as possible to improve the odds that a man’s genes would survive into the next generation. This suggested maximizing the number of mates regardless of their quality.
As economies developed and work became the main path to wealth, investing in children’s human capital started to make sense. In this new richer world more children survived into adulthood, reducing men’s need for a harem of wives to sire as many as possible. Instead, it paid off to have a smart wife who could educate them. This change encouraged women’s education. In poor, primitive societies it was pointless, let alone potentially destabilizing, to educate women. But once men’s purpose shifted from having many children to having a few better-educated kids, educating mothers to rear them became a useful investment. These shifting priorities changed the economics of the mating market too, pushing up the price of higher-quality women and thus making polygamy less affordable.
Perhaps the most compelling hypothesis,