Authors: Marina Adshade
Dollars and Sex (19 page)
Everyone here is happy with his or her potential spouse, except for the woman who has been matched to the man who has the least to bring to a marriage.
Is there any way that we can make her happier?
If polygamy were permitted, she could be made happier by rejecting her current marriage proposal and pursuing a marriage proposal from the man who has the most to offer a wife. That may not make his first wife happy, but in a society with institutionalized polygyny, she would have anticipated that her wealthy husband would take a second wife if one were available. If she preferred to be married to a poorer man with one wife to being married to a wealthy man with two wives, she would have rejected his offer of marriage. Given that she accepted it, however, she still has to be happier being married to this man than to either of the other two available men.
Societies with institutional polygamy and a very unequal distribution of resources among men often have marriage arrangements that look like this:
Everyone is happy with his or her mate, if they have one, but the poor man at the bottom of the income distribution is left without a wife.
What is the point of this simple model? Well, the economic criterion for determining if a policy is efficient requires that there is no policy that could make one individual better off without making another individual worse off, given an initial allocation of resources among individuals. This condition does not require that everyone is happy with his or her allocation, nor does it require that everyone be treated equally.
Is the marriage system described in our model Pareto efficient or can it be improved upon by imposing monogamy, for example?
Imposing monogamy would certainly make the man who brings the least to a marriage happier because, with that marriage institution, the woman who was initially matched with him would have to accept his marriage proposal if she wanted to be married. So he would be made better off, but she would be made worse off because that is not the decision that she would have made had she been given the option of marring a richer man. This suggests that the current system of institutionalized polygamy is Pareto efficient. It may not be perfect, someone is still unhappy, but it is as perfect as we can get given the distribution of resources.
I should point out that if in our simple model we started instead with institutionalized monogamy, then that arrangement would also meet the criterion of Pareto efficiency. Imposing polygamy on that society may make women who would have otherwise been forced to marry men at the bottom of the resource distribution better off, certainly, but it also would make those men who now will never marry worse off.
WHEN PROSTITUTION BECOMES PREFERABLE TO MARRIAGE
In our model, a woman who is matched with a poor man can choose only between being his sole wife and being one of several wives of a wealthy man. There are alternatives, though, including the possibility that she could find more than one poor man (brothers for example) and marry them both. That would both give her more resources and allow all men to marry. For these reasons, it makes sense that societies that allow polygyny should also allow polyandry.
In reality, these institutional arrangements rarely exist.
One possible explanation, proposed by economists Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn, is that when given the option of being either a wife with multiple husbands or one of many wives, some women would say,
“
No thanks. I would rather be a prostitute.
”
As we already know, polygynous marriage leaves many men unmarried. Since unmarried men would still like to have sex, however, unless they are prepared to resort to having sexual relationships with married women (which no doubt happens), the only option available for many unmarried men is to turn to prostitutes for sex.
As a result, polygynous marriage increases the demand for prostitutes where it is prevalent and drives up the price men are willing to pay for sex. That increase in price encourages women to choose prostitution over marriage, leading to high rates of prostitution in polygynous societies and explaining why polyandry rarely exists in conjunction in polygyny.
The idea that women who might otherwise become wives are willing to prostitute themselves when prices are sufficiently high may sound outrageous, but Steven Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh observed over the course of their prostitution study in Chicago that when the demand for prostitutes increases over the July Fourth weekend, women who were not prostitutes before the spike in demand begin to enter the market in response to the higher pay.
As an aside, this same logic explains why in China, where single men greatly outnumber single women, many women become prostitutes rather than marry; the excess of men in that market makes entering the sex trades profitable enough that women are willing to forgo the benefits of marriage.
In this case, institutionalized monogamy is also Pareto efficient in the sense that if it were replaced with institutionalized polygyny, the criterion would not be met, as some individuals would become better off (the rich men and their wives) but only at the expense of making others worse off (the poor men).
So the first point to be made here is that if a society has institutionalized polygamy, and women are freely permitted to refuse offers of marriage they do not like, then imposing monogamy helps men, but makes women worse off. This is because institutionalized monogamy forces women to marry men they would not have married had they been able to choose an alternative.
The second point is that the more unequal the distribution of resources among men, the more incentive there is for a woman to want to be part of a polygynous household. In a polygynous household, resources have to be shared over more people, not only more wives but their children as well. So if the richest man has 50 percent more resources than the poorest man, that difference in wealth will probably not generate polygyny since the second wife would still be better off being married to the poorer man. The only condition under which a women would choose to become the second wife of the wealthy man would be one in which he has significantly more resources than poor menâat least double but probably more.
I said earlier that the absence of polygyny in wealthy nations is a mystery, and this model illustrates why that is the case. The one characteristic of many modern-day wealthy nations is that they have very high levels of inequality. The wealthiest men in the United States, for example, are not just two or three times wealthier than the poorest menâthey are hundreds of times wealthier than even those in the middle of the income distribution.
If all that mattered to wealthy men was the number of wives they themselves had, then wealthy nations should have developed polygyny as the dominant marriage institution at some point in history. The fact that they did not requires a more sophisticated economic explanation than the one described by our model.
IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED, THAT A SINGLE MAN IN POSSESSION OF A GOOD FORTUNE MUST BE IN WANT OF A WIFE . . . OR TWOOne possible reason for why currently wealthy nations have not adopted polygamy is that wealthy men have historically had more sons than did poor men. This is the case not just because wealthy men had more children, they did, but because successful men tended to have more sons on average than did poor men (the ratio of sons to daughters for U.S. presidents used to make a good argument for this claim, but the last three
presidents (without a single son among them) have rather made a mess of those numbers). If wealthy men in the past cared about their sons' wellbeing, they might have supported institutionalized monogamy even if they had preferred polygamy.
Anyone who has read a historic romance novel, such as those written by Jane Austen, knows that in the past the sons of rich men did not all become rich men themselves. Economic historians like Gregory Clark and Gillian Hamilton show that the wealthier landowning class in England prior to the Industrial Revolution had more children that survived to adulthood, but that many of those children later moved into the lower economic classes; inheritance laws favored the eldest sons, leaving younger children to essentially fend for themselves.
While a wealthy father might have preferred to have more than one wife for himself, and he might lobby for laws that would permit that arrangement, institutionalized polygyny would have reduced the probability that some of his sons, the ones who did not inherit wealth, would marry and have a family. Even if those sons did marry (after all, they did not become the poorest men in society; they just became poorer than their elder brother), polygyny would have certainly reduced the supply of women suitable to be the wife of a nobleman's son. Polygyny would have forced each subsequent generation of men to marry women who were essentially inferior, as all the daughters born into the superior classes would be wed to only the wealthiest men.
Just as inheritance laws that passed the bulk of a man's estate to his oldest son prevented the dilution of the family's assets, laws that enforced monogamy prevented the dilution of the family's genes.
Along the same vein, polygyny increases the demand for wives, which effectively increases the value of wives on the market. I don't doubt that the fathers of middle- and lower-class daughters would have been happy to see their daughters marrying above their station, so to speak, but I wonder how the fathers of upper-class daughters would feel about their daughter being only one of multiple wives. Certainly their daughters would make better matches (for example, more women would have a chance to be married to the king), but the political value of a good match for a daughter is eroded when she is forced to compete with multiple wives within the same household.
IS MONOGAMY DRIVING US TO DRINK?
I will admit this much: if I had to live in a household where my husband had more than one wife, there would have to be alcohol involved. The reality is, though, that most individuals in polygynous relationships in the developed world are part of either Mormon fundamentalist or Muslim traditions, both of which forbid the consumption of alcohol. Is there a relationship between monogamy and alcohol consumption? Is having only one spouse driving us to drink?
Economists Mara Squicciarini and Jo Swinnen pose this question in an American Association of Wine Economists working paper and find that preindustrial societies that had polygyny as the dominant marriage institution consumed less alcohol than those societies in which monogamy was the dominant institution. They also find that as individual societies transitioned from largely polygamous to largely monogamous, alcohol consumption increased.
Both of these facts suggest a relationship between monogamy and drinking alcohol.
Before jumping to conclusions here, I should point out that there is no evidence that monogamy makes us drink more or that drinking makes us more monogamous. The truth is that monogamy and alcohol consumption are merely correlated, and that some third factor, most likely industrialization, is independently driving both the transition to monogamy and the increased alcohol consumption.
We already know why monogamy is more common in industrialized economies, but it turns out that alcohol consumption is also related to industrialization. The technological
innovation that goes hand in hand with industrialization makes the production of cheap alcohol possible and gives households a high-enough income to purchase things other than just the food and shelter that are needed to survive
â
luxuries such as alcohol. And along with industrialization comes urbanization; people who live in cities have more opportunity to consume alcohol, so that cities provided the impetus to develop a drinking culture.
Of course, this doesn
'
t explain why the two dominant religions that permit polygyny also forbid alcohol consumption, but economic inquiry has its limits, and explaining religious doctrine is not a bad place to draw the line.
This is a reasonable argument for why wealthy Western countries did not adopt polygyny in the past, but it isn't the only one. A second is that most European countries have a long history of decentralized power, and monogamy was a gift to the masses that ensured their continued support of the ruling powers.
