Dollars and Sex (20 page)

George Bernard Shaw in his 1903
Maxims for Revolutionists
presented this argument best when he wrote:

“Any marriage system which condemns a majority of the population to celibacy will be violently wrecked on the pretext that it outrages morality. Polygamy, when tried under modern democratic conditions, as by the Mormons, is wrecked by the revolt of the mass inferior men who are condemned to celibacy by it; for the maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one.”

Even without democracy, it might have been smart for an authoritarian ruler to impose monogamy—if he wanted to keep his head. Economist Nils-Petter Lagerlöf developed a model that builds on the idea that an authoritarian ruler will implement laws that forbid polygyny, even at the expense of limiting himself to just one wife, if it pacifies the masses.

As I have already said, with high levels of inequality, wealthy men will be able to have many wives because women will choose to be the second, third, or fourth wife of a rich man over being the only wife of a poor man. Being a poor man in a country in which other men are extremely rich is one thing, but being a poor man who will never be able to marry while other men have many wives is quite another. When inequality is high, both in terms of wealth and access to sex, peasants form rebellions that wreck the rulers of the country. Rulers in this situation may prefer to have multiple wives, but probably not at the expense of being beheaded by an angry mob. And so they impose monogamy on everyone in an attempt to placate poor men.

A ruler will want to be certain that not only his rule will survive, but also the rule of his descendants. Laws can always be changed at the whim of whoever is sitting on the throne. If rulers involved the established church in the imposition of monogamy, however, they are better able to enforce those laws in the future as well as the present. By encouraging the established church to build monogamy into the moral code of a country, the current ruler could win even greater favor with his subjects than by simply passing laws that could be revoked at whim.

All of this is in the past, and yet monogamy persists in industrialized nations today despite the widening gap in incomes between the rich and the poor. The explanation for that phenomenon hinges on the way that we value children in industrial nations and, beyond simply explaining why we do not have polygyny in the West, suggests that even if we did change our laws to permit marriages with multiple partners, the majority of households would never be polygamous even if it were legally permitted.

THE MYSTERY THAT IS MONOGAMY

We have a mystery, the mystery of the persistence of monogamy in the face of a widening income gap between the rich and the poor (not to be confused with the “myth of monogamy,” which is a topic for
chapter 8
, when we discuss infidelity). Thanks to economists Omer Moav, Eric Gould, and Avi Simhon, we have an explanation as to why Western nations have institutionalized monogamy, despite extremely high levels of inequality.

In wealthy nations, women have the right to work and to own assets. Many women don't depend on men to support them the way that they do in countries where women have limited access to education, employment, and property ownership. As a result, a woman in an industrialized nation is free to marry a guy who lives in a cardboard box, if she wants, without starving since she doesn't need to depend on him for survival.

From a modern perspective, our Monogamy Math story probably doesn't make much sense; a woman in modern societies doesn't have to choose between being the only wife of a poor man and being the second wife of a rich man—she can stay single if she likes and still be able to provide for herself and for her children.

Our marriage institutions, however, were determined historically; monogamy was established long before women could go to school, earn income, or own property. So there has to be more to the explanation as to why we don't have polygyny in industrialized countries, with high levels of income inequality among men, other than the unwillingness of modern women to enter into these arrangements.

In the past, when almost all employment was agricultural, how much a worker earned depended more on his/her level of brawn than it did on his/her level of brains. Once countries began to industrialize, however, skills became more important, and workers with higher levels of human capital (a.k.a. education and training) began to be paid more than workers with lower levels of human capital. This change in the way in which skill was rewarded has changed the way households invest in
children; industrialization has shifted household preference away from having many children, with little or no education, toward having fewer, better-educated, children.

You will recall that in
chapter 1
, I mentioned that the decline in U.S. fertility rates began around 1800, at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. That decline was the direct result of the fertility decisions of parents responding to the current labor market conditions (i.e., the increased demand for semiskilled workers) by giving their children the best opportunity to earn an income in the future.

The solution to the puzzle as to why industrialized nations have adopted monogamy lies in this difference between the wages paid to educated workers in industrial and preindustrial nations.

In preindustrial nations, richer men typically have higher incomes than other men purely because they have access to more resources like land, for example. In terms of children, those men prefer to have many children who can work on that land and raise the income of the whole household. If the goal is to produce as many children as possible, then potential wives are not so different from each other; in fact, they are very much like the women in our Monogamy Math example.

In industrial nations, richer men typically have a higher income because they have high levels of human capital (schooling, for example). When it comes to children, those men prefer to have skilled children because they know that in the future it will be the skill level of their children that will determine their income. One way to have highly skilled children is to have a wife who is also highly skilled. Thus, industrialization increases the demand for “high-quality” wives, those who are better educated, and increases in demand have increased the value of these women on the marriage market.

The economic argument here is, essentially, that monogamy has emerged as the dominant marriage institution because the demand for high-quality children has increased the value of high-quality women in the marriage market, making it difficult for even wealthy men to afford more than one wife.

(To clarify this notion of the “value” of a wife, it is helpful to think of a wife's value as determining how much bargaining power a man has to give her in order to encourage her to become his wife. If high-quality wives have high values, that implies that husbands need to give them more say in household decisions—including the decision on how many wives he will have.)

So, while a high level of income inequality for men may encourage a society to adopt polygamy, high educational inequality for women will encourage a society to adopt monogamy. Clearly in most industrial nations the second effect, that of educated wives, has dominated the first effect, that of wealthy husbands.

There are some interesting implications that stem from this story that we have been discussing. The first is that this can explain why wives have more bargaining power in industrialized societies where educated workers earn much higher wages. It also explains why it is that men and women prefer to marry people with similar educational levels to themselves when skilled workers are paid much higher wages than unskilled workers. Finally, it is consistent with the evidence that even in poorer countries, wealthy men with high education levels tend to marry fewer wives and have fewer children, both of which tend to be more educated, than do wealthy men with less education.

In terms of what is the best policy, if we believe that eliminating polygyny in poorer nations would make children better off (there is mixed evidence on whether or not this is the case), then one way to achieve that goal would be to increase education levels. Increased education for all workers should encourage industrialization and increase the wages paid to well-educated workers. Educating women also increases their bargaining power within marriage and should have the effect of reducing the number of wives, and children, in each household.

In my mind, the most important implication from this economic approach to marriage institutions is that even if Western nations did legally allow polygamy, very few people would choose that arrangement. I know I said that legalizing polygamy would not be a Pareto improvement because
poor men would be excluded from the marriage market. But if very few people choose to live this way, then that effect would be very, very small. Plus, the reality is that many women prefer to remain single rather than marry a man that they don't desire as a husband. In that respect, economic independence for women is a much bigger contributor to bachelorhood than legalized polygamy ever could be.

HOW AMERICA CAME TO ACCEPT SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

The biggest change to the institution of marriage in the last decade has been the legal recognition, in many jurisdictions, of the union between people of the same gender.

As I said at the beginning of this chapter, institutions are the rules and beliefs that govern human social behavior. If institutions change, it is often because beliefs change, and that change in beliefs leads to a change in the rules that formally enshrine the institution.

Attitudes toward same-sex marriage have changed in a surprising way over the past two decades. What makes this an interesting story for us here is that it illustrates not only that institutions can evolve, but also that institutional change does not depend on everyone within a particular community changing personal beliefs.

Let me tell you a story that illustrates this evolution.

Several years ago a very close family friend was searching our family name on the Internet and had the good fortune to meet up with the wife of my cousin in South Africa. The two women became friends and eventually fell in love. Divorce (from my cousin) and marriage between them followed (or something legally akin to marriage, since South Africa didn't have equal marriage rights at that time). Immigration laws in Canada allowed my cousin's now former wife to enter the country (with my little second cousins in tow) as the wife of our good friend, and they lived (very) happily ever after.

At the time the big question was this: who was going to tell Dad? I loved my father, but he had not exactly left us with the impression that he was on board with same-sex marriage. But, as it turned out, we underestimated
him; he didn't need to be told (while he may not have had liberal views, he certainly wasn't naive), and to our surprise he was thrilled that they had found happiness in each other.

I never would have predicted his radical change in opinion toward same-sex relationships.

The point of the story is that people do change their beliefs, and it is through that evolution of beliefs that institutional change takes place.

As we discussed in
chapter 1
, public opinion of same-sex relationships has been evolving quickly over the past couple of decades. According to Gallup, in the United States in just fifteen years, there has been an incredible 23-percentage-point decline in opposition to the legal recognition of marriage between people of the same gender.

Part of this trend toward greater acceptance of same-sex marriage has come about because the younger generations are more accepting, and as these generations make up a greater proportion of the population, beliefs, on average, change. This is the “cohort effect.” But most of the change in beliefs over the past fifteen years has occurred not because of a cohort effect but because people, like my father, have changed the way they feel about same-sex marriage.

A paper by sociologist Dawn Michelle Baunach analyzes this change and finds that the cohort effect is only responsible for 33 percent of the change in attitudes toward same-sex marriage between 1988 and 2006. This is the last year of available data, but if we were able to look right up until 2011, with the polls showing that a change in opinion is accelerating over time, I suspect that we would find that even more of the trend is attributable to change in beliefs rather than a cohort effect.