Polygamy

There's an interesting take on polygamy in The Economist. The thesis is that polygamy spurs inequality and war in societies that have a lot of it. If the numbers are accurate, Guinea's situation is scary: 50% of women are part of polygamous households. Because the population is growing, that doesn't mean 50% of men will never marry, but the rate of never-marrying will still be very high. (The quote below is therefore not completely accurate.)

By contrast, every time a rich man takes an extra wife, another poor man must remain single. If the richest and most powerful 10% of men have, say, four wives each, the bottom 30% of men cannot marry. Young men will take desperate measures to avoid this state.

This is one of the reasons why the Arab Spring erupted, why the jihadists of Boko Haram and Islamic State were able to conquer swathes of Nigeria, Iraq and Syria, and why the polygamous parts of Indonesia and Haiti are so turbulent. Polygamous societies are bloodier, more likely to invade their neighbours and more prone to collapse than others are. The taking of multiple wives is a feature of life in all of the 20 most unstable countries on the Fragile States Index compiled by the Fund for Peace, an NGO

and

By increasing the bride price, polygamy tends to raise the age at which young men get married; it takes a long time to save enough money. At the same time, it lowers the age at which women get married. All but the wealthiest families need to "sell" their daughters before they can afford to "buy" wives for their sons; they also want the wives they shell out for to be young and fertile. In South Sudan "a girl is called an old lady at age 20 because she cannot bear many children after that," a local man told Marc Sommers of Boston University and Stephanie Schwartz of Columbia University. A tribal elder spelled out the maths of the situation. "When you have 10 daughters, each one will give you 30 cows, and they are all for [the father]. So then you have 300 cows." If a patriarch sells his daughters at 15 and does not let his sons marry until they are 30, he has 15 years to enjoy the returns on the assets he gained from brideprice. That’s a lot of milk.

I wonder what the rates are elsewhere: for example, China. Another article claims In 19th-century China, where as many as 25 percent of men were unable to marry, "these young men became natural recruits for bandit gangs and local militia," which nearly toppled the government. In what is now Taiwan, unattached males fomented regular revolts and became "entrepreneurs of violence."

(Since polygamy is almost entirely polygyny, I use the more familiar blanket term.)

The Economist article touches briefly on how women in polygamous marriages fare (and, for fairness, cites defenders), and you can draw your own conclusions, but other sources agree that the answer is: very often badly. A book (name eludes me) about women in Chinese households was particularly grim: the mother-in-law or the chief wife could abuse the rest, and in the book that was quite common. Statistics may be a bit hard to come by, though--the book was anecdotal, with all that implies.

Genesis and Samuel describe a few polygamous families--I don't recall any that seemed happy.

Polygamy seems to be becoming a hot topic recently, though--I gather there was even a TV series that critics said we should learn from.

How about we don't go there? Yes, no doubt it is terribly unfair to the already-married who try to come here to live. Still, no.