Single-Spouse Marriage Systems: the elite male problem

While most human marriages have been one husband, one wife, most human societies have permitted multiple-spouse marriages. Most commonly, they permitted a man to have more than one wife.

Since fathering a child takes rather less inherent biological effort than mothering one, it is hardly surprising that multiple wives (polygyny) is the most common deviation from single-spouse marriage.

In societies where women make substantial contributions to subsistence — almost invariably, hoe-farming societies — rates of polygyny can get very high. For the cost of adding extra wives is much less than in societies where males dominate subsistence activity: typically plough-farming and pastoralist societies.

Foraging societies tend to have low levels of polygyny, as subsistence contributions are relatively even (the subsistence contribution of women is more constant, that of men more nutrient dense) and entirely labour driven. There are no productive assets, beyond weapons and other hand-held tools.

The landscape management and foraging complexity of Aboriginal societies in Australia generated distinctive patterns of gerontocratic polygyny. Old men married young women, young men married their widows and, in their old age, married young women. It kept fertility down and fostered the transfer of complex foraging knowledge across the generations. They also developed some extraordinarily complex marriage-and-kin systems as part of complex landscape management, as that preserved a rolling network of kin connections.

If women control the main productive asset, and there is no other basis for elite male status, then there is no elite male problem. If that is not the case, then if a society is going to have compulsory single-spouse marriage systems, it is the elite males who have to be convinced. There seems to be two general reasons for the elite males to accept single-spouse marriage.

First, there are very strong pressures for social cohesion. If there is a need to have maximum internal cohesiveness against outside groups — specifically, if there is a need to include low-status males — then a single-spouse system minimises internal sexual competition and maximises the breadth of stakes in the success of the group. The fewer elite males there are, the lower the cohesion pressures need to be for such an arrangement to emerge.

This is the pattern that seems to explain the emergence of single-spouse systems in the classical Mediterranean and in groups such as the early Christians and the Alevis. In the case of classical Greece and Rome, access to slaves further reduced the cost of single-spouse marriage to elite males.

The second reason for single-spouse marriage being accepted by elite males is if the education cost of raising a child, particularly a son, to elite status is sufficiently high. Multiple-wife systems mean less investment by the father in individual children. If such an investment is at a premium, then a single wife is a better option.

This is the pattern you see in the Indian caste system and in the modern world. Brahmins could theoretically have multiple wives, but very rarely did, as the training investment in raising a Brahmin son was so high. Indeed, this very high training cost seems likely to be the reason why the jati system developed — to ensure the daughters of Brahmin, who understood the needs of raising a Brahmin son, were available to marry Brahmin grooms.

Single-spouse systems did not develop as territorial or population expansion devices. On the contrary, polygyny is a much better territorial expansion device because it creates a shortage of wives. Polygyny creates a shortage of wives as a woman who gets married leaves the marriage market, but her husband does not. So low-status men end up excluded from the marriage market. The classic response to this problem is “those people over there have women, take theirs”.

Islam sanctified this pattern, with the Quran explicitly endorsing sexual access to “those your right hand possesses” (Ma malakat aymanukum: i.e. women acquired by the sword). Sanctified sexual predation helped drive the territorial expansion of Islam for a thousand years. From its rise in C7th Arabia to the turning back of Islamic expansion into Europe after the Battle of Vienna, 12 September 1683. (And yes, that is apparently why 11 September was chosen in 2001.)

The Norse (Viking) raids also seemed to have been significantly fuelled by polygyny and died away as the Norse lands Christianised.

If external expansion is fuelled by low-status men seeking women that the local marriage market does not provide them, then elite males have no reason to accept a single-spouse system. Which comes back to; if one wants to explain why a single-spouse system is being accepted, then one has to explain why elite males have accepted the system, as they are giving up the benefits of multiple wives.

These musings are part of the intellectual scaffolding for a book to be published by Connor Court looking at the social dynamics of marriage. As they are somewhat a work in progress, they may be subject to ongoing fiddling.

The taxman cometh (but only for what he can see)

There have been two great transformations in human affairs. One is the Neolithic Revolution, the transition from foraging to farming. This is a transformation which is still going on, as there are still some foraging groups around the planet (though it is a vanishing way of life). The second is the Industrial Revolution, the shift from reliance on what is produced by land (farming), a factor of production managed but not created by humans, to reliance on factors of production produced by humans, the produced means of production (capital), such that farmers change from being about 80% of the workforce to less than 5%.

Compare and contrast
Both transformations are technological and involve expanded use of energy, setting off dramatic population increases (the second much faster than the first). In the foraging-to-farming transition, humans no longer merely took food from the environment around them; they deliberately grew food. This food was typically storable, so able to cope with variations in food production across the seasons.  Farming both increased the (food) energy to humans and allowed it to be stored for later use, to be actively managed across time. (Hence the very different attitudes to time between foraging and farming cultures.)

Industrialisation used wind, water and (particularly) steam energy to produce things which produced things. Increased agricultural production allowed increased production in general, with expanding sources and use of energy, ushering the creation of, not merely mass prosperity, but increasing mass prosperity. This is in stark contrast for the foraging-farming transition, where it is likely that general standards of living actually fell and, with some exceptions, remained stagnant for thousands of years.

Another contrast is that the foraging-farming transition lead to hierarchical societies with elite-dominated rulerships--whether autocratic, monarchic (i.e. containing powerful noble elites) or deliberative. The last were polities run by elite assemblies, the most democratic of these being some Mediterranean city-states where as much as a third of the adult population got to vote--i.e. male citizens; women, slaves and resident foreigners being excluded. Outside the Mediterranean, assemblies were also important in cities in Lower Mesopotamia and in the kshatriya republics of India. Conversely, with some hiccups, the Industrial Revolution has led to much more broadly-based forms of political life. Another contrast is that the share of output taken by taxation tended to be fairly constant across farming rulerships but has been steadily increasing in modern states.

Why did farming lead to hierarchical societies dominated by controlling elites? The standard answer has been increased production of food led to a surplus above subsistence which allowed a more differentiated society. The problem with this is, why there was any such surplus? Why did not population just increase to consume the surplus? What blocked population increase sufficient to allow the creation of the food surpluses that sustained these elites?

The second problem is, even if there was a food surplus, why did that not just lead to increased specialisation? What happened such that population was blocked from rising to consume the food surplus and that surplus was largely appropriated by a narrow, controlling elite? And, moreover, elites of differing sizes, with different land tenure systems.

Expropriating what you can see
Three Israeli economists have produced a paper (pdf) which provides an elegant answer. Their argument is that the key element is transparency; both in stored food and in expected production. Food had to be stored across the seasons, which made it more vulnerable to expropriation. In their words:


[Read the rest at Skepticlawyer.]

Emancipation

Much of the history of the last few centuries is the history of emancipation, sometimes labelled that, sometimes labelled differently. Catholic emancipation, the emancipation of the Jews, the emancipation of women, the abolition of slavery, civil rights, queer emancipation; the list goes on. The process of extending basic moral and legal protections to an ever wider range of people.

This history of emancipation is a history of expanding capacities, particularly cognitive and economic capacities. They are products of the Scientific, Commercial and Industrial Revolutions.

Farming can support much higher populations than foraging. But it is also a highly constrained existence; one is tied to a particular plot of land and the rhythms and vagaries of the seasons. If the population increases too much, then the constraints pinch tighter. As niches get more constrained, they are defended more rigorously. As the risk of hunger increases, patterns that have proved viable will be clung to. There are good reasons why landed peasantries are notoriously socially conservative. (Landless peasants, by contrast, can be an explosive social force since they both lack assets at risk from social disorder and seek the security of landholding—by expropriation, if necessary.)

Religion can both validate the moral constraints needed to make such a society function and legitimise particular social arrangements that provide order. And order has very strong value to a farming society. Seeing the cosmic order as a struggle between order and chaos is much older, and more widespread, than seeing it as a struggle between good and evil.

Commerce can be disruptive because it is dynamic: it seeks income from exchanges, so seeks both people to exchange with and goods and services to exchange—it is a process of discovery. Though commerce is much concerned with risk, the new or unusual has much greater implications of benefit than in farming. It is why static orders tend to frown on commerce: its dynamism is disruptive; as is its focus on exchange, on gains through trade. Features that can loom large in static orders—ethnicity, belief, gender, sexuality—are a matter of indifference to a commercial order. Commerce has persistently treated marginal groups better than has religion or politics.

French man of letters Voltaire expressed this memorably in a famous passage in his Letters on the English, first published in 1734.

Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts. There thee Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker’s word. At the breaking up of this pacific and free assembly, some withdraw to the synagogue, and others to take a glass. This man goes and is baptized in a great tub, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: that man has his son’s foreskin cut off, whilst a set of Hebrew words (quite unintelligible to him) are mumbled over his child. Others retire to their churches, and there wait for the inspiration of heaven with their hats on, and all are satisfied.

So a shift towards a more commercial order will tend to be a shift to a more cosmopolitan or ecumenical social order.

Science can also be disruptive to established orders: the expansion of knowledge, the discovery of how things work, can both undermine old rationalisations for existing arrangements and validate the possibility of new arrangements. This includes discovery of other cultures: awareness of potentially very different social patterns can make existing social arrangements seem much more contingent and so contestable. Either way, the expansion of knowledge makes received wisdom seems less authoritative; more up for reconsideration, even rejection.

Technological change can magnify both the commercial and the scientific effects: the need for new skills, the experience of new possibilities, makes existing arrangements seem even more contingent and, worse, impediments. What was previously reassuring and protective can come to seem outmoded and constraining. It is not that people are not still threatened by change (some can be very threatened), it is that change acquires more partisans. The Industrial Revolution, the expanding commerce of multiplying technology, was a conjunction and magnification of the disruptive effects of commerce and science.

The shift from being a society dominated by the land/population ratio to one dominated by the capital/population ratio creates both a more dynamic and far less constrained society. Capital can not only expand far more than land can, but comes in far more varied forms and social consequences. Social possibilities increase greatly.

In such circumstances, the dynamics of emancipation are a push-and-pull interaction. With the expansion of commerce, science and technology, it becomes easier for the traditionally repressed to conceive of a situation where their repression goes away. As incomes rise, and transport and communication capacities expand, it becomes easier for them to interact and organise. As labour becomes more scarce (compared to capital), and so more valuable; as incomes rise; as commercial possibilities expand; paying attention to the formerly repressed offers more gains. As more people experience social change, further change becomes more “normal”, so less dramatic and threatening. Change begets change. The example of the emancipation of one group, the lifting of some socially imposed constraints, inspires another.

Some socially imposed constraints turn out to still have value: that part of the process can overshoot. Some of what went on in the 1960s is reasonably construed as having done that. But the process of expanding legal and moral protections, so that all have the same protections, is a process that cannot overshoot—provided full reciprocity is maintained. That is, provided it is a process of expanding the moral and legal community so all share the same protections, not a process of finding new ways to privilege certain groups. After all, emancipation is basically the process of achieving full legal and moral reciprocity.

It is no accident that the liberal capitalist societies of the West have led the way in the processes of social emancipation. They, more than any others, had the triad of expanding commerce, science and technology.

[This post has been amended to expand the argument and has been cross-posted at Critical Thinking Applied.)

Economic ratios: crude but useful

Economists typically divide factors of production into land (the natural means of production), labour (human effort) and capital (the produced means of production). There has been something of an ongoing game in economics and broader social analysis in finding new forms of capital, so we have physical capital (factories, buildings, machinery, tools, etc.), human capital and social capital. As well as, of course, financial capital, but that is (in some ways) the odd one out.

It is a useful, if crude, measure to look at broad ratios. In an agrarian society where capital is scarce, two useful ratios to consider are the land/labour ratio—the number of workers to (productive) land—and the land/population ratio—the number of people to (productive) land. If capital is sufficiently scarce—as in a largely agrarian economy—the former is the main determinant of average wages and the latter the main determinant of average living standards.

So, if population goes up, wages tend to fall since expansion in output does not (without some improvement in technology or weather) match the increase in population, so labour becomes less scarce compared to land (or, more precisely, what labour is providing becomes less scarce to what the land is providing) and labour's price (wages, to use what is often a somewhat anachronistic term) fall. If population goes down, wages tend to rise as labour becomes more scarce compared to land so its price (wages) rises. As, for example, after the Black Death, which killed people not land, building, tools, machines or coins. The land/labour ratio matters because it sets relative scarcity and expresses how much—given the existing level of technology (both physical and social)—can be produced per person.
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Obviously, we are talking averages here: this says nothing about how wealth and income are distributed in a society. Wages can rise with population if there are economies of scale (people able to specialize more and so produce more) and scope (more forms of skills or other specializations being available), as in the early medieval recovery from the post-Roman collapse. Basically, if people are able to get more out of what they have. It is what labour, land and capital provide which is crucial (hence the "absent some change in technology/expansion in capital/change in climate" provisos).

You can also get wages rising with population if the amount of productive land is being expanded, as also happened in the early medieval period during the recovery from the post-Roman collapse. It happened even more dramatically (for Europeans) with the European settlement of the Americas and the Antipodes. People talk as if land is fixed but, in economic terms, that is not so. Land can be cleared or reclaimed. It can also become more accessible--refrigerated transport reduced the value of farming land in the UK, for example, because it meant it was competing more directly with Argentina, Australasia, etc. Land can be used for different purposes. So, for example, if officials have discretionary control over land use (such as for housing), that can create housing price bubbles, as a constrained quantity response leads to an increased price response to increased demand. That turns houses into inflation-beating-assets, so people invest in them in part as inflation-beating-assets. Until, of course, the belief that prices will just continue to rise collapses, so they stop being inflation-beating assets—that part of their value being partly or completely wiped out as the bubble “bursts”.

The ultimate point being it is not land on its own which is productive, but land use.

Once capital becomes a significant part of the productive processes, one gets major shifts, since capital is far more expandable than use of land. In industrialised economies, the capital/labour ratio becomes much more important. Wages tend to rise because capital tends to expand faster than the labour force, at least in capitalist economies. In other words, increasing levels of capital makes labour more scarce even if population is increasing.

But this is a ratio thing. Increasing the labour supply must put downward pressure on wages by making labour less scarce than it otherwise would be. So the movement of women into the paid workforce and large-scale immigration have put downward pressure on average wages, even though household incomes have tended to increase (since they include more income-earners). Increasing levels of capital can, however, compensate, or more than compensate, for rising labour supply.

For example, Jewish migration to Palestine increased wages, since the migrating Jews increased the total level of capital more than they increased the population. The increased wage levels attracted non-Jewish migrants. Both rising wages and out-migration upset the social control mechanisms of the local landlord class (such as debt-bondage). It is not surprising that a prominent member of said landlord class led agitation against the upsetting newcomers, rather than trying to seek some mutually beneficial arrangements. (The freedom, democracy and prosperity of the “Zionist entity”—nowadays very visible through TV and TV ads—continue to be a standing indictment of various Arab regimes.)

There are lots of complications, such as labour/capital ratios varying between industries. Still, economic ratios—crude though they are—are useful in understanding broad trends in societies and economic history.

ADDENDA: This post has been amended to improve clarity and to expand points.