CHAPTER 5
MARRIAGE IS A FINE INSTITUTION
MARRIAGE IS AN INSTITUTION
Mae West famously said, “Marriage is a fine institution—but I’m not ready for an institution yet.” And she was right; marriage is a fine institution—in the economic sense of the word. Institutions to an economist are simply the rules and beliefs that govern human social behavior. So while sociologists and anthropologists have spent over fifty years debating the definition of marriage, economists are content to understand that marriage refers to the actions that individuals take that define what it means to be a family in that individual’s community.
The usefulness of thinking about marriage as an institution is that what it means to be “married” is not carved in stone; the institution has varied significantly from place to place, from community to community, and, importantly, over time. While individuals within a community cannot choose the form of marriage institution adopted by their community—that is something that is decided by the community as a whole—other factors, economic factors, determine how the institution evolves over time.
For example, historically the majority of the world’s societies have recognized marriage as the union of one man and several women: heterosexual polygyny. A few have recognized marriage as the union of one man and one woman: heterosexual monogamy. A very small number of societies have recognized alternative arrangements like polyamory (multiple husbands and wives) and polyandry (one wife with multiple husbands).
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MARRIAGE
How marital relationships were organized among our ancient ancestors was very closely related to way they accumulated food.
Early foragers (between 5 million and 1.8 million years ago) lived in a primal horde with no long-term mating. Males and females had sex with many partners, and any food sharing was principally in exchange for sexual favors (which, by the way, went not only in both directions but also between same-gender pairs). Because the diet consisted of fruits, nuts, and insects that could be gathered while still carrying and protecting a baby, males were not needed as protectors or providers, making marriage redundant.
As the climate warmed and the forests receded, humans began to move out into the savanna where their diet consisted of gathered vegetation, scavenged meat left behind by predators, and, eventually, meat killed by hunters using tools. Increased meat in their diet meant that babies were born earlier and required more care from their mothers if they were to survive. Resources were spread evenly among men and, as a result, monogamy was the marriage institution that prevailed in this period (between 1.8 million and 23,000 years ago). Really, though, the best descriptor of marriage in this era is serial monogamy, since couples only stayed together long enough to ensure the survival of their offspring (about four years).
Between 23,000 and 10,000 years ago, people started to become agriculturalists, growing their own food. The invention of the plow over 4,000 years ago led to the division of tasks into those that were done by men and those that were done by women. Agriculture also meant that men could accumulate wealth, bringing an end to the equality among men that had existed in previous eras. Despite this inequality, monogamy prevailed, possibly because fieldwork made it impossible for a husband to guard more than one wife.
There is another theory, put forward by Brooks Kaiser and me, that humans were biologically hardwired for monogamy because that was the institution that ensured the greatest survival of children, and that certain types of agriculture, particularly dairy farming, encouraged the persistence of that marriage institution despite inequality between men. This was because dairy animals produce pair-bonding hormones, encouraging monogamy even when agriculture encouraged polygyny.
Supporting this theory is the observation that communities in those areas in which cattle farming was prevalent, such as in Europe, mostly practiced monogamy while those in areas that did not, such as in Africa, mostly practiced polygyny.
Most countries today that have monogamy as the legal structure for marriage in reality practice a form of marriage that is better described by the term “serial monogamy”—a marriage system in which one man or one woman can have multiple husbands or wives (so, effectively polygamy)—but are permitted to be married to only one partner at any given point in time.
When we compare the economies of countries with institutionalized serial monogamy to those with institutionalized polygamy, we find that the industrialized nations of the world, without exception, have rejected polygamy as a marriage institution. This observation is a bit of a mystery to economists, for reasons I will describe in a minute, but it illustrates the link between the nature of a country’s economy and the form of marriage institution recognized by the government.
A second example of the relationship between economics and marriage institutions is the willingness of the wealthy nations of the world to institutionalize marriage between two men or two women (same-sex monogamy). The individual citizens of countries that have legally recognized same-sex monogamous marriage (or, in some cases, civil unions) may not all feel that same-sex monogamy is “marriage” in their books, but institutional change doesn’t require everyone in the community to be on board; a change in the legal framework (i.e., the rules) is all that is required for institutional change to take place.
The relationship between same-sex monogamy and national wealth is less of a mystery than the relationship between serial monogamy and national wealth; one of the reasons nations have been able to accumulate wealth is that their respect for individual rights and freedoms has created an innovative environment in which new technologies flourish. It is this same respect for individual rights and freedoms that have made it possible for advocates of same-sex marriage to fight and win their battles for legal recognition for same-sex monogamous unions. So economic development hasn’t made same-sex marriage possible, but rather the same qualities that made it possible for countries to grow rich have also made them more open to institutional change in marriage.
Before talking more about institutions, let me first give you an example of the role economics plays in how individual households choose the way in which their marriages are organized and how those individual choices translate into society-wide adoption of that form of organization.
BILL GATES’S HOUSE HAS ITS OWN WIKIPEDIA PAGE
According to its Wikipedia page, Bill Gates’s home is a 66,000-square-foot mansion nicknamed Xanadu after the fictional estate owned by the recluse, Charles Kane, in the movie Citizen Kane. Gates lives there with his wife, Melinda, suggesting that he is probably less lonely than the owner of the original (albeit fictitious) Xanadu who lived, and died, alone in his gothic home.
I would like you to consider this entirely fictional scenario: imagine that Bill Gates actually is a little lonely in that big house of his and decides one day that what he really wants is a second wife. The house is certainly large enough for multiple families, so who is made worse off by that decision?
Melinda Gates, presumably, would be psychologically worse off than she would have been had she stayed the only wife, but in terms of economic well-being, it is hard to imagine that the addition of one more wife to the house would in any way reduce the resources available to her and her children below their current level. Also, if Melinda had anticipated that Bill would eventually find a second wife when she decided to marry him, then it has to be true that even if she would rather remain his only wife, she still would be better off as Bill’s first wife than if she had pursued other options for marriage, for example, marriage to a man who would never have a second wife.
This argument may sound counterintuitive since most us can’t imagine living in a polygynous household, but it has to be true if Melinda had come into the marriage expecting there would be two wives and had acted in her own best interest and that of her children when she made that decision; in choosing hypothetically polygynous Bill, she revealed that she prefers being married to him over being married to another man, despite having to tolerate a
second wife.
The second wife Bill finds and marries, let’s call her Natalie, is definitely better off than she would have been otherwise. She would be married to one of the wealthiest men in the world, and she and her children would never lack resources. She may not like being the second wife, but again, if she knew that Bill was already married to Melinda before she chose to marry him, as long as she was acting in her own best interest and that of her children, then she must be better off than she would have been otherwise. She could have chosen to be the only wife of another, presumably poorer, man or to have remained single, but the fact that Natalie chose to be Bill’s second wife reveals that that is the arrangement that makes her the happiest.
Bill is presumably better off. He can afford a whole harem of wives, so the resources available to him are not diminished, and the fact that he himself made the decision to take the second wife reveals that he prefers the arrangement with two wives to the arrangement with one wife.
It sounds like everyone in the fictitious polygynous household of Xanadu is better off with this marriage arrangement than they would have been without it; they have to be since they all willingly participated. It doesn’t mean that polygyny is their ideal marital arrangement, especially for the women, but it does mean that out of their particular set of possible marital arrangements, this one is preferred.
So, here is my second question: if extremely wealthy men, like Bill Gates, could find multiple women to be their wives and if these marriage arrangements made everyone better off, then why do the laws in the United States prevent such arrangements? Or put another way, why do wealthy nations, in which rich men are significantly richer than are poor men, have institutionalized monogamy?
The answer to these questions really boils down to two factors.
The first is that Melinda Gates is an intelligent and educated woman, and in industrialized nations where education and intelligence are highly valued, she has quite a bit of power on the marriage market. She would never have agreed to be the first of two wives because she probably could have found another man who was willing to make her his one and only wife without having to marry a significantly poorer man. Sure, he may not have been one of the wealthiest men in the world, but I suspect that she would be willing to give up a fairly large amount of wealth rather than share her husband with another woman.
This means that if Bill wants a wife who is willing to be the first of two wives, then he has to choose a woman of less intelligence and education than Melinda. That might seem like a fine idea, but if he also wants to have intelligent and educated children, in an economy in which those characteristics are highly valued, he probably wouldn’t do that. Sure, some wealthy men are married to less-educated but highly attractive women, but those women also have a great deal of market power and are much more capable of finding a marriage arrangement in which they are the only wife.
So Bill, I suspect, would still have only one wife even if the laws allowed him to have more because wealthy men in industrial nations, just like him, have historically preferred to have one ideal wife rather than several less-than-ideal wives. Wealthy men have revealed that when it comes to wives, quality is more important than quantity.
If this is the case, then the answer to the question “Why do the laws in the United States prevent such arrangements?” is simply that economic factors led to a social norm in which each man had only one wife, and the lawmakers, at the beginning of confederation, simply codified that social norm into law.
As I have already said, there are two factors that can explain why wealthy nations prefer monogamy. In order to understand the second factor, we need to be reminded that there is one other person who has so far been ignored in this fictional story: the man that Natalie would have married had she not married Bill. We are going to call him Charles.
Charles is clearly worse off with Bill’s decision to become a polygamist than he would have been if Bill continued to be a monogamist. Charles may find another woman to marry, now that his ideal wife Natalie is married to Bill, but he would have preferred to be married to her rather than any other woman.
Now that Charles has married this less-than-ideal woman, another man is without his ideal wife and now has to marry another less-than-ideal woman. This continues down the line of men—from the richest to the poorest—until somewhere at the end of the line is a man with no prospects of a wife at all.
If there are equal numbers of men and women in a polygynous society, then it is a mathematical reality that some men will be disenfranchised from the market for marriage (and possibly sex) because of that institutional arrangement.
It is odd to think that lawmakers (predominately wealthy and powerful men) would impose institutionalized monogamy, effectively forcing women to marry poorer men, if they themselves would benefit from polygynous marriage institutions. But in a democracy, and even in other political systems, it is generally considered disadvantageous for lawmakers to create laws that generate a class of angry, unmarried, and celibate men. A second possible argument for institutionally rejecting polygyny is to placate the masses of poorer men who would suffer as a result of their sexual disenfranchisement.
Before I explain the economic rational that underlies this story, I feel like I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the occupant of the fictitious Xanadu, Charles Kane, may have died in that house as a sad and lonely man, but he did marry—twice, in fact. And while he may not have been legally married to both women simultaneously, he, like many other wealthy men, managed for a while to live an essentially polygynous lifestyle with both a wife and a mistress. I think we all know how those stories end—in Hollywood movies at least—badly.
Kane’s story illustrates that even without institutionalized polygamy, the existence of both infidelity and serial monogamy belies a social tolerance of alternative marriage arrangements for the wealthy. We have those topics to look forward to in chapter 8, when we talk about how economics influences infidelity.
MONOGAMY MATH
Economic analysis is based on the logic embedded in mathematics, and I would be remiss if I failed to share any mathematical modeling with you in this book. With that in mind, let me illustrate a model that describes a particular concept that economists use to determine whether or not a current arrangement is the best one possible. That concept is called Pareto efficiency, and for an arrangement to be the best in the Pareto sense means that there is no other arrangement that could make some people better off without making others worse off. In a world ruled by economists, the criteria for Pareto efficiency would be used to determine whether or not governments should changes laws, like the ones that impose monogamy or forbid same-sex marriage.
I affectionately call my illustration below “Monogamy Math.”
All economic models use symbols that convey specific meaning. Monogamy math is no different, and here we will use four symbols, each representing an individual man or woman.
The first two symbols represent the women in the model who are either married or seeking a husband. They are either happy or unhappy:
The second two symbols represent the men in the model who are either married or seeking a wife, and they are either happy or unhappy:
For simplicity, we will assume that the women are all pretty much identical in the sense that all the men would be happy to be married to any one of them. The men, however, are all different in terms of what they bring to a marriage. This difference could mean income, which is what I will use here, but it could mean other things as well: good genes, a caring disposition—whatever you like to think that women are looking for in a mate.
If there were three men in this economy and we could line them all up according to what they bring to a marriage, then they would be arranged thus:
Everyone in this simple model would like to be married, and the way that men and women meet for the purposes of marriage is by being randomly placed into pairs (think of this as a speed-dating event for stick figures). The men will all be happy wi
th their potential mates, since the women are all effectively the same, and will each make an offer of marriage to their partner. The women, on the other hand, will be either happy or unhappy depending on how much, or how little, their potential partner is able to bring to a marriage. Imagine after the couples are randomly matched they look something like this:
Everyone here is happy with his or her potential spouse, except for the woman who has been matched to the man who has the least to bring to a marriage.
Is there any way that we can make her happier?
If polygamy were permitted, she could be made happier by rejecting her current marriage proposal and pursuing a marriage proposal from the man who has the most to offer a wife. That may not make his first wife happy, but in a society with institutionalized polygyny, she would have anticipated that her wealthy husband would take a second wife if one were available. If she preferred to be married to a poorer man with one wife to being married to a wealthy man with two wives, she would have rejected his offer of marriage. Given that she accepted it, however, she still has to be happier being married to this man than to either of the other two available men.
Societies with institutional polygamy and a very unequal distribution of resources among men often have marriage arrangements that look like this:
Everyone is happy with his or her mate, if they have one, but the poor man at the bottom of the income distribution is left without a wife.
What is the point of this simple model? Well, the economic criterion for determining if a policy is efficient requires that there is no policy that could make one individual better off without making another individual worse off, given an initial allocation of resources among individuals. This condition does not require that everyone is happy with his or her allocation, nor does it require that everyone be treated equally.
Dollars and Sex Page 12