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.
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.
As in most matters. There are many studies about lesser sentences for women vs men who commit the same crimes.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
I agree, but nitpick: capital by definition can be put to use to produce or gather something. So resource-producing capital is redundant.
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.)