The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [41]
Polygamy entrenches disparities, allowing the rich to hoard all the women and bumping the poor out of the gene pool. This doesn’t make for very harmonious social relations. Throughout much of the 2000s, hundreds of teenage boys were ejected from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a breakaway Mormon settlement straddling the border between Utah and Arizona, to allow its religious leaders to hoard dozens of brides. The argument suggests that for big democratic states to survive, polygamy had to go.
Polygamy was common among the elites in the Homeric world. But classical Greece and Rome, from the tenth century before the Christian era, were monogamous in an important way: citizens were allowed only one wife and were not allowed to cohabit with concubines, but they were allowed to have as much sex as they wanted with their slaves, mostly taken in war against other cultures. Researchers have suggested this arrangement allowed even poor, weak men to have a wife and reproduce, yet also allowed the powerful to plant their seed in many gardens.
From Greece and Rome through the medieval church, monogamy spread across the Judeo-Christian world. In the fifth century of the Christian era, Saint Augustine called monogamy a “Roman custom.” One hundred twenty-five years later, the Emperor Justinian said “ancient law” forbade husbands from having both wives and concubines. Christianization spread monogamy across the ancient world. Except for a few outbursts of polygamy—among the Anabaptists in the sixteenth century—monogamy became the established mating institution of the West.
THE VALUE OF WOMEN’S WORK
The economist Gary Becker won the Nobel Prize in economics for a body of work started in the 1960s about human behaviors and interactions beyond simple market transactions. Paramount among them was his analysis of the family. Becker described it as a little factory in which husband and wife are specialized producers of complementary household goods: women equipped for rearing children trade home production with men, who will specialize in bringing home the bacon from the labor market. Together they profitably provide communal goods and services—among which the most important are kids. The power of Becker’s economic formalism explains more than just the nuclear family. It sheds light on an array of institutions governing the entanglement of men and women, tracing them to transactions in markets for mates and family goods.
The economic nature of the marriage bargain explains why most societies have codified special protections to ensure wives’ access to resources. In a Darwinian world in which men’s optimal strategy is to plant seed in as many women as possible, this ensures that women have the needed resources to successfully carry their offspring. More than two thousand years before the Christian era, the Sumerian code of Ur-Nammu set a price for divorce. A man had to pay his ex one mina of silver, about enough to purchase three slaves, or only half if she was the widow of a previous marriage. The Babylonian code of Hammurabi demanded that a man who left the mother of his children restore her dowry and provide her sufficient income to ensure their sustenance.
But if laws were deployed to guarantee women’s access to men’s resources, so they codified strict standards to ensure that men would not rear someone else’s child. Harsh penalties for female adultery have historically protected men from women’s optimal reproduction strategy: to choose an okay man to marry and provide resources, and have occasional affairs with other mates with superior genes.
Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski documented that in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, husbands had the right