That is an interesting and important question; if you find a solution it could make you very rich. On the face of it large computer networks should have made finding a suitable mate much easier but it does not seem to have happened, possibly because other things were making it much harder.
> So yeah it is a conundrum why they can feed you a perfect video, link, ad. But [...]
I'm not sure whether you were being sarcastic, but they're not especially good at that, either. Driving engagement has been quite successful overall, but for serving the best video/movie/show, there's been a lot of effort and not a lot of great results. Maybe there's a clue here: matching someone to the right offering does more poorly as the time and effort to determine quality increases. You aren't likely to be able to run hundreds of A/B tests on an individual's matches if each requires a date.
After writing the previous message, I ended up thinking about the topic a bit and I think that an app that could be interesting is one where you do not actually hook up with someone. Beyond the basic profile it would allow you to share the following:
1. When and where someone can encounter you, e.g. "I am going to this concert tomorrow or I will be at that event next week"
2. Whether you are single/looking for a partner/date/hookup/whatever (you'd specify what exactly)
Others could save your profile and get notifications if you post anything about where you'll be.
The disadvantage is that sharing all of that information publicly is a bit creepy and people (especially women) would be concerned about unwanted attention, stalkers or worse.
Alternatively, you could pre-select a group of people in a similar way you do on tinder and share that info only with them. It still does not eliminate the risk entirely sice you don't really know those people personally (presumably, if you do then the app is not needed) but it acts at least as a basic filter.
If it worked, it would result in people meeting at events they most likely both enjoy. Actually matching someone would be left for the meatspace but I think it mostly works like that anyway, a dating app match does not mean much. But if you know how many people who are looking for someone are going to be attending an event, it might be an additional incentive to go there and once you are there to start chatting to specific people, presumably they are more open to strangers talking to them. The app could also double as a "what's going on in town" app which is something that is the only reason I still have a Facebook profile and there doesn't seem to be a good alternative.
It would be similar to the medieval/early modern environment where unmarried men and women wore different clothes from those who were married, clearly distinguishing them from the crowd ... and of course there were only so many events in your or neighbouring villages you could go to to meet people. The difference is that all of this would remain invisible to anyone not using the app (or anyone you don't want to share that information with).
One great advantage of these apps is that they only show you people interested in dating new people (mostly because they are single). But the disadvantage is that they show you too many people. A lot of those you'd never notice in person you can also easily filter out in the apps, so that's still fine. But there is just so much more information in an in person meeting so that a 5 minute conversation in person tells you more than even the most detailed dating app profiles. An hour-long chat tells you even more.
Therefore, for the apps to be useful one has to be willing to go to a lot of first dates and sometimes you know after 5 minutes that this is not going to be a match (or perhaps the other person knows). If you met in real life first, you'd not go on a date in the first place. So while the apps gives you an opportunity to meet a lot of new people, the filters it gives you are not that great and so it is still quite costly to use it (in your time).
Also, while it is great that you can be sure the other person is single (well, not really, but let's assume that for simplicity), it also puts a certain amount of pressure on the meeting. You are basically meeting complete strangers but immediately it is a date. In my experience, this is not how you meet people in the real world where you get to know people a bit first and only then go on a date with them ... at which point you know you are interested in them and presumably they are at least curious about you. It is hard to get invested like that with someone you just met in a café for a chat with little prior context, especially since you spend a lot of the time more or less introducing yourselves.
So I think that to solve this, the dating apps would have to simultaneously manage to bring people together who are more likely to match in real life - it needs better filters. And preferably also do it in a relaxed way where you end up meeting a bunch of such people at once, casually chat to many of them and then figure out who you'd actually like to keep talking to. This second bit is something shared hobbies do very well, social dancing is a particularly good example (a dance can also tell you a lot about the other person and it is an easy to start a conversation with someone you just dance with). University also does this, but sadly that is no longer available once you've graduated. If somehow you can make a social environment happen where many or even most people there are searching for partners and are somewhat likely to match AND ideally also do it in a way that it is not obviously a mass dating event (then everyone will be nervous and the way they meet will be a lot less casual), you probably have a winner.
I have no idea how you could do this with an app though :-) One theory I have is that dating has become harder since people used to marry and have children earlier, the institutions which actually work well in partner-matching, i.e. the school or the university, managed to create a lot of matches. Once these are no longer available to you due to your age, dating gets harder and it was harded in the past as well - but also no longer needed by most people, so less people were talking about how hard dating was.
I also think that the rise in the interest in social dancing (which I anecdotally observe, although I have no data) is one way to create such matching social technology (also) for people who are not students any more. It is not perfect, but something like that is actually a good example one could start with when trying to improve this technology.
At INFINITA this past week and before you eyes there was a marital or pre marital arrangement were the female of the species has 2 male ( a blond and a brownish one ) right at her disposition and undisguised from the POV of the social observer. Did you miss that. And what are the economics. Is she paying for BF1 say $1000 and $1.00 for BF2? Again what are the economics and what are the chances that she - no being in short supply- will reproduce her self according to the Old Testament, or is it just onether woke joke? Thanks for sharing your rhymes - obviously there is a fixation with King William (hero) and the french foe. Oh and what about rhymes about David and Golliath?
on a final note. We - as in you and I - need to discuss UBI further and not just toss is around. Are you still on Roatan?
I think you must be wrong about a bigamous offer for $X being equivalent to a monogamous offer for $X. The sole wife gets all of whatever time and effort her husband is prepared to spend on emotionally supportive labor within the marriage; but it's not likely that a man with two wives will spend twice the time and effort that he would on one wife (since a second wife typically provided less marginal utility than a first). The second wife must anticipate that she will get an inferior service; on the other hand, the first wife may well fear that she will see what she gets diminished to the benefit of the second wife. I don't think you can say ceteris paribus about the tradeoff outside of money and material assets.
That was the _definition_ of an offer for $X. The price isn't in money. A bigamous offer for $X means an offer that is equivalent, from the standpoint of potential wives, to a monogamous offer of the same value. Perhaps the monogamous offer involves the one wife running the household, bearing and rearing children, and taking a part time job to help support the family. The equivalent bigamous offer, from a richer man, involves the wives having nannies and leisure and lots of spending money, making up, for them, for the cost of sharing a husband.
Monogamy is the invention of the Jewish People/Faith/Culture as a system to preserve and protect family patrimony and prosperity. It was injected to Christianity same as the condition that women would not participate in the religious ceremonies as rabi/priest/ etc.
It's a convenient shorthand. There are societies with literal cash prices, but even there that isn't all that goes into the price in either direction. A man who pays a $1000 bride price for a wife and provides her with a nanny and a cook is paying a higher price than the same bride price in a marriage where she will do all the cooking and child care.
I did warn you what I was doing with the first line of the post.
Heinlein explained exactly the kind of bidding between the sexes in his notes for the final TV show he undertook to write (and gave up on in disgust at scriptwriters' revisions)—notes that later turned into a substantial part of the background for the Loonies in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. They were included in the Virginia Edition, and reading them was instructive.
I recall reading somewhere that polygyny is generally not a improvement for society, since it leads to the lower number of higher status men with more wives and the greater number of low status men with no wives at all. How is this reflected in the analysis? There does not seem to be any mention of couples in which the woman moves from a full share in a low status man to a part share in a high status man, after the initial redistributive price transfer.
In the model as described, after the initial price shift some men find that they do not want a wife at the new, higher price. That's "Men who do not change the number of wives they have are unaffected; men who reduce the number of wives they have from one to zero in response to the higher price or increase the number above one to take advantage of the legalization of polygyny, and women who at the old price did not choose to marry but at the new price do, are better off."
In traditional Islamic society I don't think the polygynists were marrying a very large fraction of the women. They were either elites, which were not very numerous, or ordinary people with a second wife. Lane, who lived in Egypt for a while in the 19th c., said that of the people he knew not one in a hundred had a second wife. I think they were ordinary people, not elites.
I'm confused about how we can assert that men who reduce the number of wives they have from one to zero in this model are better off. That implies that if they had a choice between one wife at the previous level or no wife at the new level, they'd choose the second, meaning they're better off with that arrangement. What reason do we have to think that?
Another issue, which I believe Joe is touching on, is that the supply of potential wives and potential husbands is nearly fixed on a marriage decision timescale, and the producers of each have different incentives anyway than the immediate market participants, meaning that the usual (insufficient-supply -> higher-prices -> more-production)* pattern is broken.
I'm sorry if I was unclear. I am analyzing the change in two steps:
1: The price of a wife goes up to the level it would have with polygeny, nothing else changes.
2: The pattern of marriages readjusts to what it would be under polygeny. Some men get a second wife, some go from one wife to zero.
Step 1 makes all men worse off by the price change, all women better off by the price change, so the net effect is zero — women gain just as much as men lose. Step 2 makes everyone who changes marriage pattern better off. The men who go from one to zero are better off because, at the new price, a wife costs more than she is worth — that is why, in the world with polygeny, he would be single.
So the now-single man is worse off than he was initially, better off than he was after step 1. The shift to being single reduced, but did not eliminate, the cost to him of the price rise. Since step 1 imposed no net cost on the population and step 2 was a benefit for some, a cost for none, the combination was a benefit.
I think the term you are looking for inelastic supply. The gain is not an increase in marriage age women, it is an increase in the number who choose to get married and an improved allocation. Increased supply in your sense would come in, in the long run, if it were the parents who collected the price, since they would have more incentive to produce and rear daughters, but my analysis is of a society like ours where individuals rather than their parents control whom they are willing to marry.
I wasn't thinking so much of men who do not want their wife at the new higher price—those who "reduce the number of wives they have from one to zero in response to the higher price", because, say, they don't want to wash the dishes more frequently? Rather, it was those who /do/ want their wife at the higher price but who cannot now pay it—ie, the individual who, later in the text, "is [newly] priced out of the market and remains a bachelor", eg because he is now insufficiently attractive to any woman. Two questions:
(i) Considering just the second man and his wife, is the legalization of polygyny an improvement? Agreed (for the sake of argument), a pure transfer between spouses is economically neutral. But this does not apply to our couple. For, in your original example, this "pure transfer" consists in the man's now paying the higher price to the wife, but, in the couple we are now imaging, the man /cannot/ pay that price, and accordingly there is simply no "transfer" to ground any claim of economic neutrality. So why suppose it /is/ a net improvement? FWIW, I think it may or it may not be.
(ii) Assuming it isn't, what fraction of all pre-polygyny couples fit the description of the second couple, and is the net cost (to society) of their situation outweighed by the net benefit to others of polygyny?—It take it the gist of your response is that we can expect few such couples ("one in a hundred"), and that their net costs will indeed be outweighed. Empirically, that may or may not be. But is there anything in the model itself that implies this prediction?
I don't know if my answer to the previous question answers this. The wife gets the new, higher price, but from a different husband than she would have had if polygeny was not legal.
Economic efficiency measures value by willingness to pay, doesn't distinguish between "doesn't choose to buy" and "can't afford to buy."
Way back in the early sixties when I lived in NYC before marrying and moving up here to the top of the world I had that attitude, - that for every one of them and his choice there's two more chicks available for my choice!
In future we will be able to control the gender of a baby even in natural pregnancies or IVF might become common. In that case it would be interesting to see how people would prefer genders of their babies.
A price of zero for marrying an unusually desirable woman …
I think I was taught that something with a price of zero is not an economic good.
Isn’t likely that the attitudine of women toward polygyny resembles that of men toward male homosexuality? They may be just put off by the very idea even in principle it should improve their terms of trade in the marriage market.
This is a barter market. What terms of marriage you define as "zero price" is arbitrary, since it means "terms of marriage equivalent to some specific terms of marriage plus zero dollars."
Just as an observance, if you look at the current "multiple marriage" online entries, a lot of them appear to be one where there's a single,relatively physically unattractive female and 4-5 young, smallish males, quite possibly what today are called "incels". Guess there's a market for everyone.
I also tend to believe that a rather large percentage of boys have (or have had) no one teaching them how to be a young man, then a full adult man, in a way that is agreeable to young females who may be on the marriage market.
And too many of those boys/young men have succumbed to the idea that the'best' man is just like a woman except with dangly bits.
I see them lots of places. Usually linked to by someone else. On X, sometimes on FB. Had a couple linked by friends. I think I've seen them linked especially from TikTok, which I don't look at. And Instagram. I tend to stick to substacks and X. I have a long-standing X account but have never posted or even "liked" anything. I just use it to follow some accounts.
I believe it probably has its own Reddit. I just see them in passing in various places.
But it seems every time it's a fairly weird, overweight female Lefty (odd-colored hair, piercings, tattoos, etc) and 3-5 pasty-looking small males. I think I've seen a brown guy or two. I don't really pay attenion much, it's just that your entry triggered the memory.
The one polyamorous household I know is not at all like that — rationalists, smart, I think more women than men but I don't know in any detail who has what relation to whom. Children. I've also come across informal polygamies in the past — one I remember was one woman and two men.
But in practice, would women actually be better off for legalizing polygyny? You'd have to take into account potential irrationality when dealing with the real world. Perhaps a woman would agree to be a second wife after accepting a higher price for her marriage, thinking she'd be better off. But then discover the experience of being a second wife is quite bad.
We know that people make very bad choices at times. For example, someone might try an addictive drug, thinking it'll bring them more utility than the cost. But then find it actually alters their brain chemistry and ruins their life. And that's common enough many people think that outlawing the purchase of very powerful and addictive drugs is worth it, because you'll save a great deal more people from making a bad choice than you would prevent people from making a good choice.
I can envision polygyny being similar. I haven't read on the history of it in places like Utah or Muslim areas so I'm speculating why people might look at it as bad. One reason might just be that the bride's family captures all of the value from her increased price, leaving the bride worse off. But another reason might be that a prospective husband could do a facade while wooing her for a few months, to convince her he's a high-value husband. But after she's locked into marriage, he drops his high value actions like washing dishes for her, and begins to pursue more wives, and goes about spending his time washing their dishes. And mandating "You must do all my dishes" is a difficult thing to put into a marriage contract ahead of time.
Why we are failing to solve matching problem? Dating/matching apps are massive multi billion dollars industries. So there is plenty of demand
That is an interesting and important question; if you find a solution it could make you very rich. On the face of it large computer networks should have made finding a suitable mate much easier but it does not seem to have happened, possibly because other things were making it much harder.
Just after i posted this:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bipartisan-online-dating-safety-act-seeks-combat-1-billion-annual-app-scams
People are so desperate to match up they are easy pray for scams.
So yeah it is a conundrum why they can feed you a perfect video, link, ad. But cannot find a decent mate.
> So yeah it is a conundrum why they can feed you a perfect video, link, ad. But [...]
I'm not sure whether you were being sarcastic, but they're not especially good at that, either. Driving engagement has been quite successful overall, but for serving the best video/movie/show, there's been a lot of effort and not a lot of great results. Maybe there's a clue here: matching someone to the right offering does more poorly as the time and effort to determine quality increases. You aren't likely to be able to run hundreds of A/B tests on an individual's matches if each requires a date.
You might be interested in my post, some time back, on mate search and dating apps: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/modern-mate-search
More generally, I have a bunch of posts on related topics:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Sorted_Posts.html#Love_Marriage_Sex_and_Evolution_
After writing the previous message, I ended up thinking about the topic a bit and I think that an app that could be interesting is one where you do not actually hook up with someone. Beyond the basic profile it would allow you to share the following:
1. When and where someone can encounter you, e.g. "I am going to this concert tomorrow or I will be at that event next week"
2. Whether you are single/looking for a partner/date/hookup/whatever (you'd specify what exactly)
Others could save your profile and get notifications if you post anything about where you'll be.
The disadvantage is that sharing all of that information publicly is a bit creepy and people (especially women) would be concerned about unwanted attention, stalkers or worse.
Alternatively, you could pre-select a group of people in a similar way you do on tinder and share that info only with them. It still does not eliminate the risk entirely sice you don't really know those people personally (presumably, if you do then the app is not needed) but it acts at least as a basic filter.
If it worked, it would result in people meeting at events they most likely both enjoy. Actually matching someone would be left for the meatspace but I think it mostly works like that anyway, a dating app match does not mean much. But if you know how many people who are looking for someone are going to be attending an event, it might be an additional incentive to go there and once you are there to start chatting to specific people, presumably they are more open to strangers talking to them. The app could also double as a "what's going on in town" app which is something that is the only reason I still have a Facebook profile and there doesn't seem to be a good alternative.
It would be similar to the medieval/early modern environment where unmarried men and women wore different clothes from those who were married, clearly distinguishing them from the crowd ... and of course there were only so many events in your or neighbouring villages you could go to to meet people. The difference is that all of this would remain invisible to anyone not using the app (or anyone you don't want to share that information with).
One great advantage of these apps is that they only show you people interested in dating new people (mostly because they are single). But the disadvantage is that they show you too many people. A lot of those you'd never notice in person you can also easily filter out in the apps, so that's still fine. But there is just so much more information in an in person meeting so that a 5 minute conversation in person tells you more than even the most detailed dating app profiles. An hour-long chat tells you even more.
Therefore, for the apps to be useful one has to be willing to go to a lot of first dates and sometimes you know after 5 minutes that this is not going to be a match (or perhaps the other person knows). If you met in real life first, you'd not go on a date in the first place. So while the apps gives you an opportunity to meet a lot of new people, the filters it gives you are not that great and so it is still quite costly to use it (in your time).
Also, while it is great that you can be sure the other person is single (well, not really, but let's assume that for simplicity), it also puts a certain amount of pressure on the meeting. You are basically meeting complete strangers but immediately it is a date. In my experience, this is not how you meet people in the real world where you get to know people a bit first and only then go on a date with them ... at which point you know you are interested in them and presumably they are at least curious about you. It is hard to get invested like that with someone you just met in a café for a chat with little prior context, especially since you spend a lot of the time more or less introducing yourselves.
So I think that to solve this, the dating apps would have to simultaneously manage to bring people together who are more likely to match in real life - it needs better filters. And preferably also do it in a relaxed way where you end up meeting a bunch of such people at once, casually chat to many of them and then figure out who you'd actually like to keep talking to. This second bit is something shared hobbies do very well, social dancing is a particularly good example (a dance can also tell you a lot about the other person and it is an easy to start a conversation with someone you just dance with). University also does this, but sadly that is no longer available once you've graduated. If somehow you can make a social environment happen where many or even most people there are searching for partners and are somewhat likely to match AND ideally also do it in a way that it is not obviously a mass dating event (then everyone will be nervous and the way they meet will be a lot less casual), you probably have a winner.
I have no idea how you could do this with an app though :-) One theory I have is that dating has become harder since people used to marry and have children earlier, the institutions which actually work well in partner-matching, i.e. the school or the university, managed to create a lot of matches. Once these are no longer available to you due to your age, dating gets harder and it was harded in the past as well - but also no longer needed by most people, so less people were talking about how hard dating was.
I also think that the rise in the interest in social dancing (which I anecdotally observe, although I have no data) is one way to create such matching social technology (also) for people who are not students any more. It is not perfect, but something like that is actually a good example one could start with when trying to improve this technology.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/115M1j4z31zBwk8FHv0bVLfPSLxdk9mSO/view?usp=drivesdk
At INFINITA this past week and before you eyes there was a marital or pre marital arrangement were the female of the species has 2 male ( a blond and a brownish one ) right at her disposition and undisguised from the POV of the social observer. Did you miss that. And what are the economics. Is she paying for BF1 say $1000 and $1.00 for BF2? Again what are the economics and what are the chances that she - no being in short supply- will reproduce her self according to the Old Testament, or is it just onether woke joke? Thanks for sharing your rhymes - obviously there is a fixation with King William (hero) and the french foe. Oh and what about rhymes about David and Golliath?
on a final note. We - as in you and I - need to discuss UBI further and not just toss is around. Are you still on Roatan?
I think you must be wrong about a bigamous offer for $X being equivalent to a monogamous offer for $X. The sole wife gets all of whatever time and effort her husband is prepared to spend on emotionally supportive labor within the marriage; but it's not likely that a man with two wives will spend twice the time and effort that he would on one wife (since a second wife typically provided less marginal utility than a first). The second wife must anticipate that she will get an inferior service; on the other hand, the first wife may well fear that she will see what she gets diminished to the benefit of the second wife. I don't think you can say ceteris paribus about the tradeoff outside of money and material assets.
That was the _definition_ of an offer for $X. The price isn't in money. A bigamous offer for $X means an offer that is equivalent, from the standpoint of potential wives, to a monogamous offer of the same value. Perhaps the monogamous offer involves the one wife running the household, bearing and rearing children, and taking a part time job to help support the family. The equivalent bigamous offer, from a richer man, involves the wives having nannies and leisure and lots of spending money, making up, for them, for the cost of sharing a husband.
Monogamy is the invention of the Jewish People/Faith/Culture as a system to preserve and protect family patrimony and prosperity. It was injected to Christianity same as the condition that women would not participate in the religious ceremonies as rabi/priest/ etc.
Now I totally don't understand what you mean. If you don't mean money, why are you even using the $?
It's a convenient shorthand. There are societies with literal cash prices, but even there that isn't all that goes into the price in either direction. A man who pays a $1000 bride price for a wife and provides her with a nanny and a cook is paying a higher price than the same bride price in a marriage where she will do all the cooking and child care.
I did warn you what I was doing with the first line of the post.
Heinlein explained exactly the kind of bidding between the sexes in his notes for the final TV show he undertook to write (and gave up on in disgust at scriptwriters' revisions)—notes that later turned into a substantial part of the background for the Loonies in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. They were included in the Virginia Edition, and reading them was instructive.
“ attractiveness is a kind of wealth”
…as anyone who has ever heard or made reference to a woman’s “assets” is well aware.
I recall reading somewhere that polygyny is generally not a improvement for society, since it leads to the lower number of higher status men with more wives and the greater number of low status men with no wives at all. How is this reflected in the analysis? There does not seem to be any mention of couples in which the woman moves from a full share in a low status man to a part share in a high status man, after the initial redistributive price transfer.
In the model as described, after the initial price shift some men find that they do not want a wife at the new, higher price. That's "Men who do not change the number of wives they have are unaffected; men who reduce the number of wives they have from one to zero in response to the higher price or increase the number above one to take advantage of the legalization of polygyny, and women who at the old price did not choose to marry but at the new price do, are better off."
In traditional Islamic society I don't think the polygynists were marrying a very large fraction of the women. They were either elites, which were not very numerous, or ordinary people with a second wife. Lane, who lived in Egypt for a while in the 19th c., said that of the people he knew not one in a hundred had a second wife. I think they were ordinary people, not elites.
I'm confused about how we can assert that men who reduce the number of wives they have from one to zero in this model are better off. That implies that if they had a choice between one wife at the previous level or no wife at the new level, they'd choose the second, meaning they're better off with that arrangement. What reason do we have to think that?
Another issue, which I believe Joe is touching on, is that the supply of potential wives and potential husbands is nearly fixed on a marriage decision timescale, and the producers of each have different incentives anyway than the immediate market participants, meaning that the usual (insufficient-supply -> higher-prices -> more-production)* pattern is broken.
* I'm sure there's some economic term for this?
I'm sorry if I was unclear. I am analyzing the change in two steps:
1: The price of a wife goes up to the level it would have with polygeny, nothing else changes.
2: The pattern of marriages readjusts to what it would be under polygeny. Some men get a second wife, some go from one wife to zero.
Step 1 makes all men worse off by the price change, all women better off by the price change, so the net effect is zero — women gain just as much as men lose. Step 2 makes everyone who changes marriage pattern better off. The men who go from one to zero are better off because, at the new price, a wife costs more than she is worth — that is why, in the world with polygeny, he would be single.
So the now-single man is worse off than he was initially, better off than he was after step 1. The shift to being single reduced, but did not eliminate, the cost to him of the price rise. Since step 1 imposed no net cost on the population and step 2 was a benefit for some, a cost for none, the combination was a benefit.
I think the term you are looking for inelastic supply. The gain is not an increase in marriage age women, it is an increase in the number who choose to get married and an improved allocation. Increased supply in your sense would come in, in the long run, if it were the parents who collected the price, since they would have more incentive to produce and rear daughters, but my analysis is of a society like ours where individuals rather than their parents control whom they are willing to marry.
I wasn't thinking so much of men who do not want their wife at the new higher price—those who "reduce the number of wives they have from one to zero in response to the higher price", because, say, they don't want to wash the dishes more frequently? Rather, it was those who /do/ want their wife at the higher price but who cannot now pay it—ie, the individual who, later in the text, "is [newly] priced out of the market and remains a bachelor", eg because he is now insufficiently attractive to any woman. Two questions:
(i) Considering just the second man and his wife, is the legalization of polygyny an improvement? Agreed (for the sake of argument), a pure transfer between spouses is economically neutral. But this does not apply to our couple. For, in your original example, this "pure transfer" consists in the man's now paying the higher price to the wife, but, in the couple we are now imaging, the man /cannot/ pay that price, and accordingly there is simply no "transfer" to ground any claim of economic neutrality. So why suppose it /is/ a net improvement? FWIW, I think it may or it may not be.
(ii) Assuming it isn't, what fraction of all pre-polygyny couples fit the description of the second couple, and is the net cost (to society) of their situation outweighed by the net benefit to others of polygyny?—It take it the gist of your response is that we can expect few such couples ("one in a hundred"), and that their net costs will indeed be outweighed. Empirically, that may or may not be. But is there anything in the model itself that implies this prediction?
I don't know if my answer to the previous question answers this. The wife gets the new, higher price, but from a different husband than she would have had if polygeny was not legal.
Economic efficiency measures value by willingness to pay, doesn't distinguish between "doesn't choose to buy" and "can't afford to buy."
Your "Attitudes to Other People’s Sexual Tastes"
Way back in the early sixties when I lived in NYC before marrying and moving up here to the top of the world I had that attitude, - that for every one of them and his choice there's two more chicks available for my choice!
In future we will be able to control the gender of a baby even in natural pregnancies or IVF might become common. In that case it would be interesting to see how people would prefer genders of their babies.
Not sure I understand what is meant by:
A price of zero for marrying an unusually desirable woman …
I think I was taught that something with a price of zero is not an economic good.
Isn’t likely that the attitudine of women toward polygyny resembles that of men toward male homosexuality? They may be just put off by the very idea even in principle it should improve their terms of trade in the marriage market.
This is a barter market. What terms of marriage you define as "zero price" is arbitrary, since it means "terms of marriage equivalent to some specific terms of marriage plus zero dollars."
Just as an observance, if you look at the current "multiple marriage" online entries, a lot of them appear to be one where there's a single,relatively physically unattractive female and 4-5 young, smallish males, quite possibly what today are called "incels". Guess there's a market for everyone.
I also tend to believe that a rather large percentage of boys have (or have had) no one teaching them how to be a young man, then a full adult man, in a way that is agreeable to young females who may be on the marriage market.
And too many of those boys/young men have succumbed to the idea that the'best' man is just like a woman except with dangly bits.
What do you mean by the online entries? Blogs?
I see them lots of places. Usually linked to by someone else. On X, sometimes on FB. Had a couple linked by friends. I think I've seen them linked especially from TikTok, which I don't look at. And Instagram. I tend to stick to substacks and X. I have a long-standing X account but have never posted or even "liked" anything. I just use it to follow some accounts.
I believe it probably has its own Reddit. I just see them in passing in various places.
But it seems every time it's a fairly weird, overweight female Lefty (odd-colored hair, piercings, tattoos, etc) and 3-5 pasty-looking small males. I think I've seen a brown guy or two. I don't really pay attenion much, it's just that your entry triggered the memory.
I think it's usually under polyamory.
The one polyamorous household I know is not at all like that — rationalists, smart, I think more women than men but I don't know in any detail who has what relation to whom. Children. I've also come across informal polygamies in the past — one I remember was one woman and two men.
But in practice, would women actually be better off for legalizing polygyny? You'd have to take into account potential irrationality when dealing with the real world. Perhaps a woman would agree to be a second wife after accepting a higher price for her marriage, thinking she'd be better off. But then discover the experience of being a second wife is quite bad.
We know that people make very bad choices at times. For example, someone might try an addictive drug, thinking it'll bring them more utility than the cost. But then find it actually alters their brain chemistry and ruins their life. And that's common enough many people think that outlawing the purchase of very powerful and addictive drugs is worth it, because you'll save a great deal more people from making a bad choice than you would prevent people from making a good choice.
I can envision polygyny being similar. I haven't read on the history of it in places like Utah or Muslim areas so I'm speculating why people might look at it as bad. One reason might just be that the bride's family captures all of the value from her increased price, leaving the bride worse off. But another reason might be that a prospective husband could do a facade while wooing her for a few months, to convince her he's a high-value husband. But after she's locked into marriage, he drops his high value actions like washing dishes for her, and begins to pursue more wives, and goes about spending his time washing their dishes. And mandating "You must do all my dishes" is a difficult thing to put into a marriage contract ahead of time.
Under Muslim law the marriage contract could forbid the husband from marrying additional wives without the first wife's consent.
The analysis assumes the possibility of divorce