More cows, more wives
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Yeah, but, as it turns out with modern migration trends, the revealed preference is that they would want to, given an opportunity. Being European, I would also prefer to live like a European.
Lifelong monogamy as a default and an almost universal ban on kin marriage seem to be solid contributors here.
Also, I don't think the current remnants of hunter gatherers are all that informative about our past. These are different people who live in marginal lands. Hunter gatherers of Europe would have had access to prime real estate and extremely food dense coastal areas, made long voyages at least occasionally. Quite simply, successful societies look different.
They’re like the PHP developers of humankind. They limp on, but everyone else moved on a long time ago. If they were successful, they wouldn’t still be doing it.
> Yeah, but, as it turns out with modern migration trends, the revealed preference is that they would want to, given an opportunity. Being European, I would also prefer to live like a European.
The revealed preference is that they want to continue to live the same way, but to do it in European countries as they are nicer places to live.
The problem is that they are nicer places to live because "living like a European" is what produces these nicer places to live.
With a sprinkle of colonizing and ravaging those lesser places, my liege?
The corollary for western monogamous society should be clear: traditional marriage is not strictly repressive, it's also a form of egalitarianism and redistribution of social capital.
If we dismantle marriage and let raw pastoralist dynamics run rampant, we might very well see the same hypergamous tendencies and that many of those excluded from the love market take up "other", less peaceful pastimes.
The incel people are this social dynamic.
Sexual freedom is a lot like capitalism. It leads to wealth concentration. Very few men attract the majority of women. This implies a class of sexually poor men. I suppose so called incels rising up and trying to seize the means of reproduction is a predictable outcome.
Many religions impose a sort of sexual communism: they try to stabilize society by imposing monogamous relationships, thereby ensuring availability of women for every man and preventing the accumulation of sexual capital. This explicitly counteracts the hypergamous dynamic mentioned in TFA where women would prefer to share a rich man than be in a monogamous relationship with a poor one.
That being said, China does face a bride price crisis (caili), that has reached tens of thousands of dollars, an exorbitant sum for the the rural areas where it is common. This has led to unrest and public pressure on the government to intervene and regulate this market.
I (man) was the one who pulled the trigger on my divorce but that followed years of conflict and withdrawing from both sides and ultimately you can point to specific milestones (who killed the bedroom, who opened a separate bank account first, who stepped out first, who wouldn't come back to counselling) but it's actually better for healing not to be preoccupied with the blame game and instead focus on where one's own growth opportunities are.
It's not the life you hope for, but there's a lot of social messaging that that's just the way it is, it's what you signed up for, you would be selfish to leave, the grass won't be greener, and also it's probably your fault anyway for not being a better husband. The messaging to women in romcoms and the like is much more toward you deserve better, be brave, junk the loser, go get the life you want.
As a guy who was in a mediocre marriage like this for many years, I basically got my emotional needs met elsewhere: through work, family, friends, time and activities with my kids, etc.
Most guys can suck up now-loveless marriage trivially if kids are fine (after kids come, this is pretty standard path for marriages), heck we can still enjoy sex greatly in such situation. Most women, not so much. I know it sounds sexist, trust me I would be very happy if this wasnt true but when I look/ask/listen around it is.
As an cca older guy at certain age the patterns start emerging left and right, and my own marriage can see some of it, just like most other marriages around us.
Some make it, some don't. When it fails its mostly mixture of personality resilience of both sides rather than some objective measure of (lack of) quality of relationship. Its easy to judge but please be kind to those who are going/went through, they may have been a better partner than ie you and still it wasnt enough to sustain it.
Also it’s often fear of stepdads. My mom dumped my dad so she could date a string of abusive assholes. It would give me pause before leaving a marriage that wasn’t utter misery.
As in most matters. There are many studies about lesser sentences for women vs men who commit the same crimes.
Anything less than fifty percent is state sponsored kidnapping.
Vs. even if marriages were magically 100% secure - the costs of having kids in most modern societies have skyrocketed over the past half-ish century or so.
It's similar to how the justice system doesn't really care about justice, it cares about detailed and systematic applications of the laws, which sometimes coincides.
What it actually cares about is not having to pay CHIP, etc. Having a man who isn't the biological father paying for stuff means the state doesn't have to pay for services. They don't care at all beyond that.
Maintaining a middle/upper middle class lifestyle for your kids is expensive. Few people can afford daycare, 5x college tuitions, etc. Extended families tend to be spread out and social networks aren’t what they once were.
Dudes online blather about paternity, divorce, etc. all nonsense and all irrelevant. Bad marriages and divorce are not new, although religious and conservative people try to imply that. The entire movement for prohibition in the early 20th century was driven by absent fathers who would drink their wages away and let the children starve in some hovel.
The only thing that’s “new” is women have the ability to choose birth control.
> In contemporary Western societies, unigeniture is either considered wrong or is illegal; we no longer differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate offspring...
At best, those are common ideals in Western society. Try talking to an old attorney who does family law.
Also worth a mention - in primitive conditions, polygamy can speed the spread of highly beneficial genes through the society. The textbook case is immune system genes - historically, disease killed a lot of our ancestors.
I agree, but nitpick: capital by definition can be put to use to produce or gather something. So resource-producing capital is redundant.
A blog post like this is mostly hand-waving at complex ideas, but that was her argument for it.
And whatever nice-sounding things TFA might suggest about diving a herd, it's obvious that 8 cattle are worth 4X as much as 2 cattle. And any "leave 1/4 of my herd to each of my 4 children" division will result in a 4X downgrade to the next generation's standard of living.
(Oh, yeah - the TFA has plenty of optimistic hand-waving.)
This makes the false assumption that men don't care about their children. Society and the courts tend to agree with it, but the vast majority of divorced men I know complain about how little they get to see their children, combined with how they are seen as only a paycheck and not as a parent. Things are slowly changing, men are more likely to get custody, and joint custody does happen - but there is still a lot of the "men are not able to raise kids" attitude around.
OT, but I find this fact mindboggling whenever I read it.
Our way of timekeeping and general education emphasizes the last 2 millennia. Popular (highschool level) history usually goes back maybe 5-8. The furthest is maybe the end of the ice age ~14 millennia ago.
But then you learn there are still 270 millennia of human history left that we know almost nothing of...
Usually, polygamous societies tended to become monogamous or perish. Most of the young men who couldn't afford wives could be send to war and die there. Else, they could become very violent very fast because they had nothing to lose.
Looking at marriage norms across the world actually suggests the opposite takeaway. What’s remarkable is how similar marriage norms are among people who had almost no historical contact with each other. Confucian marriage 2,000 years ago wasn’t that different from Christian marriage 100 years ago, despite those two cultures having almost nothing else in common.
When anthropologists identify societies with significantly different marriage norms, it’s always some random tribal society that never grew beyond a relatively small number of people and never developed civilization to speak of.
That’s not a good example. Confucian norms allowed for concubinage and sororate marriages.
> What’s remarkable is how similar marriage norms are among people who had almost no historical contact with each other.
What evidence do you have for this? And why is it important to you at all?
Hard to take this nonsense seriously. Northwest europe was christian and there are plenty of examples of non-monogamous marriages in the bible.
> One thing became abundantly clear: most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans.
No shit. Heck, even within europe it was known. Such as the areas controlled by muslims. It was known for hundreds of years.
> It’s easy to see how the arrival of wealth reshaped marriage: more cows, more wives.
This is true prior to farming. Those who claimed the best hunting grounds ( wealth ) or access to water ( wealth ) would get more wives.
> Women, however, do. They have a choice: be the second or third wife of a rich pastoralist or be the first wife of a poor one. It can pay to be the former.
Did women really have a choice? Or wouldn't it make more sense for the father to marry her off to the guy who offers him the most dowry? The guy writes further down : "Parents can also command a higher bride price for daughters seen as compliant and chaste.".
> Monogamous systems, therefore, may have evolved to limit the transfer of resources, rather than as a form of monogamous mating.
Monogamous systems happened in most "civilizations" to maintain peace. When you have a significant group of men without women or prospects for women, it can lead to instability. Especially in civilizations with large populations. Monogamy introduces a sense of fairness which everyone - men, women, fathers, mathers, etc can buy into.
It's why monogamous systems are dominant in every developed civilizations from europe to east asia and in between. And nonmonogamous systems are dominant in rural tribal backwards areas.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_patt...
one thing it mentions is how in Europe etc - places with limited land quickly pivoted to monogamy was due to limited resources. in places with limited resources, raising kids under monogamy has shown to produce the best results i.e kids tend to have better future success.
however, even though legal systems in the west restrict polygyny - due to inequality - its coming back - we already see that with onlyfans etc / high levels of prostitution in younger western females - the richer guys can maintain a harem - while the plebs become sexless incels.
Correlation is not causation. Just because they appear together doesn't mean the cows caused the marriage system. It could be that a third factor, like high male mortality in war prone herding societies, caused both.
She ignores polyandry (one woman, multiple husbands) which occurs in some herding societies like Tibet. If "livestock = polygyny" was a hard scientific law, Tibet shouldn't exist as an exception.
Note that when we talk about polygamy in the past, it's about, like in TFA, a man with many wives. Not a woman with many men.
How does the modern "free" and "liberated" world reconcile that with feminism? When we talk about modern-day polygamous societies, it's basically islam. And islam is a highly patriarcal society.
So what's the take of feminists on these facts?
The most common form is where a woman marries a group of brothers to keep family land and assets united. It is often a strategic economic decision for survival in difficult conditions, rather than just a cultural preference.
(Well, problems come when you do this as a society and create an age group of young men who have no shot at a wife because of 50/50 birth ratio. They get violent.)