This suggests that political stability depends on young men being able to pursue their romantic dreams. This would apply in any country, not just African countries. In nations in the West, an important limiting factor is the ability to get one's own apartment. That is, the ratio of average male wage to average rent. In the USA, the happiest year for this ratio was 1958, when people were spending 22% of their income on rent, on average. Not by coincidence, this was the peak year of the Baby Boom. In some sense, it was the best year in history to be a young white male in the USA. It was the year when it was easiest for an 18 year old male to get out of high school, get their own apartment, marry their high school sweetheart, and start a family. And of course, young people did this in huge numbers, which is why 1958 remains the peak year for teenage pregnancy in the USA.

But rent has been rising faster than the average male wage since 1958, and politics in the USA has become angrier and angrier. The mechanism that this article suggests, that polygamy leads to war, would also suggest an angry impulse in a country that has transformed from one where 18 year old men have their own apartment to a country where most men don't achieve their own apartment until their late 20s or 30s.

There certainly has been a change in the tone with which men talk about women. Nowadays you can find Pick Up Artist web sites where men in their 20s and 30s can supposedly learn tricks to win over women. The tone suggests that women are far away, and need to be tricked into things. In 1958, a woman was a person you lived with and shared your life with, starting when you were 18. Early marriage had its own problems, which have been picked apart in endless comedies, but according to this article, the ease of marriage in the 1950s would have explained the contentment that the American people expressed regarding their own government and way of life.

The other implication of this is that Consumer Price Index is a lousy way to track people's standard of living, because it tends to treat socks and lettuce and bicycles and apples and houses and automobiles and Xboxes and Nintendo consoles as all having the same weight to each other as their price. But if this article is right, that men need women or they become war like, that would suggest that one item (housing) has an emotional weight that makes it much more important than any other item. If we adjust the median male wage with the CPI then it seems male wages in the USA have been stagnant since 1973. But if we gave housing the kind of weight that this article seems to justify, then we could say that men have seen a declining standard of living since 1958. That is, the abundance of socks and lettuce and bicycles and apples and automobiles and Xboxes and Nintendo consoles does not make up for rising rent.