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Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

Whenever online dating comes up here, it inevitably leads to discussions of imbalances in favor of women and elite men.

This predicament isn’t really unique to online dating though. Lots of society throughout history have had polygamy (elite men get many wives, others are shit out of luck).

I’ve been wondering if war mongers in times past have been driven by this—decimate men to rebalance the scales towards the general male population (and also the elites who don’t fight).

There were baby booms after the two world wars. How much of that was due to a perceived scarcity of men among women? Did that cause them to settle quickly?

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You might be interested in the book 'The WEIRDest People in the World" by Joseph Heinrich.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51710349-the-weirdest...

It goes into the implications of institutions that were against polygamy and their impact on history among other things. It's a really interesting book.

I have read that recently and it did inspire the comment.

The people waging wars already had enough women for themselves in all likelihood.

But as he said, it wouldn't have been for themselves, but for the rest of the population

The idea that warmongers opted for war out of altruism for lower ranking men rather than personal gain, geopolitics, and power acquisition seems especially unlikely.

If they’re seeing a lot of disaffected young men without wives who commit crime and otherwise cause trouble, it might have led them to say “men these days have lost their way, we need a war to help them mature.”

That's a very silly idea.

serious people have been doing serious research with mitochondrial DNA in the area, e.g. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140924113752.h...

Late to the party. It was not a surplus of men vs women. It was a surplus of men vs jobs. It's just capitalism's credit cycle ending. It doesn't have to end that way but that's just what happened back them.

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