Many thanks for your note about my polygamy column. That column generated a lot of mail and many of my correspondents posed questions from a common list. To save time, I prepared a list of these questions and my attempts to answer them. Yours in #1 on this list.
All good wishes, Bob Frank
Ploygamy FAQs
1. What if women could take multiple husbands, in addition to men taking multiple wives? Would that not equal out the imbalance of men to women?
If polygamy were legal, then men could take multiple wives (polygyny) and women could take multiple husbands (polyandry). If the same number of men ended up in plural marriages as women, then there would be no imbalance in the monogamous group, either. In practice, however, polyandry is almost never observed in human societies and is virtually nonexistent in other species. Biologists say that this is because the number of offspring a female can produce is essentially independent of the number of mates she has, while the number of offspring a male can produce is roughly proportional to the number of mates he has. Needless to say, Darwinian fitness maximization isn't the foremost goal in everyone's mind, so some women would undoubtedly take more than one husband if polygamy were legal.
Thanks to Chris Makler for forwarding this quote on the subject:
"Polygamy, when tried under modern democratic conditions, as by the Mormons, is wrecked by the revolt of the mass of 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. Polyandry has not been tried under these conditions." George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
2. Doesn't your argument ignore that fact that women start out in a disadvantageous bargaining position relative to men?
Yes, but the point of the piece was to speculate about how allowing plural marriage might shift that balance.
3.How would the existence of same-sex pairings affect your argument?
Most studies I've seen suggest that same-sex pairings are more common among men than among women. If true, women would outnumber men in the pool of people seeking opposite-sex marriage partners. But my sense is that most of the people involved in same-sex pairings would not be involved in the heterosexual marriage market even if homosexual marriage continued to be illegal. That's not the way it was in the 1950s, of course.
4. Wouldn't a woman who thought she had entered a monogamous marriage be at risk that their husband might announce one day that he'd decided to take an additional wife?
If polygamy were legal, a woman could enter into a monogamous marriage contract of exactly the kind we have now. Her husband might later change his mind and want to take a second wife, as already happens in the current legal environment. The first wife could then cite breach of contract as grounds for divorce and claim the same legal benefits she would be entitled to under current arrangements.
On Mar 16, 2006, at 11:41 AM, I wrote:
Dear Professor Frank,
Unfortunately, by ignoreing the institution of polyandry, your argument falls apart. If women are allowed to have more than one husband, it counteracts the posited effect of polygyny on men and the need for positional arms controls. Your argument makes sense if you can argue that polyandry would be significantly less popular than polygyny.
March 16, 2006/New York TIMES
Economic Scene Polygamy and the Marriage Market: Who Would Have the Upper Hand? By ROBERT H. FRANK
-- Jim Devine / "There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity." -- Chester Bowles