[HN Gopher] More Cows, More Wives
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More Cows, More Wives
Author : oxw
Score : 82 points
Date : 2026-02-25 15:36 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.worksinprogress.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.worksinprogress.news)
| bell-cot wrote:
| Not an anthropologist - but instead of "How farming promotes
| inequality", I'd frame it as "How resource-producing capital
| promotes inequality". It could be livestock in a migratory
| herding society, or boats and nets when those were critical for
| fishing, or whatever.
|
| > 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.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| > I'd frame it as "How resource-producing capital promotes
| inequality". It could be livestock in a migratory herding
| society, or boats and nets when those were critical for
| fishing, or whatever.
|
| I agree, but nitpick: capital by definition can be put to use
| to produce or gather something. So resource-producing capital
| is redundant.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Yes-ish? I'm not a CPA or MBA (ditto most folks here) but
| looked at a few online dictionaries for "capital". From cases
| like gold in a hunter-gatherer society - a status-signaling
| luxury and trade good, but you probably can't get much more
| than perishable foods or nicer stone tools in exchange - it
| seemed worth the clarifying/emphasizing redundancy.
| mandevil wrote:
| TFA talked about the difficulty of division, and waved at the
| idea that farming was different from pastoral societies because
| of the ease of division: farming land is more valuable as it is
| concentrated (because of the well known dangers of having many
| very small plots that are difficult to work and improve) but a
| herd (or fishing tools) can be split and merged far more
| easily. So agriculture drives to unigenture.
|
| A blog post like this is mostly hand-waving at complex ideas,
| but that was her argument for it.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Based both on family history (farmers both sides) and experts
| such as https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-
| death-an... - I have grave doubts as to the downsides of
| having many small plots of land in early agricultural
| conditions. The critical issue is having enough total land
| (measured by productivity) to feed your family in bad years.
|
| 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.)
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Eden was probably just a metaphor for life before agriculture
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > So how does one explain the parts of the world, like Europe and
| large parts of Asia, that are unequal yet predominantly
| monogamous?
|
| 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?
| n1b0m wrote:
| Polyandry exists mainly in isolated, agrarian, or mountainous
| regions like Tibet, Nepal, and parts of India to preserve land
| and family resources. It is also found in some African
| communities and among indigenous groups.
|
| 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.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| I don't know the feminist take, but just to explain: the reason
| there is much much more polygyny than polyandry is basic
| reproduction mechanics. Women max out at ~13 kids, the most
| reproductively successful men have had thousands. So, a single
| well-resourced man can keep a bevy of wives at close to their
| reproductive limit no problem.
|
| (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.)
| M95D wrote:
| You should clarify the use of "polygamy" term in this context.
| Having multiple spuses, implicitly having sex and children with
| them? Having children with multiple partners but no official
| mariage? Having sex with multiple partners but no children?
| geremiiah wrote:
| Enjoyable read. I've long since been wondering whether the low
| birth rates have something to do with the insecurity that
| surrounds modern day marriages. If you're a woman you don't want
| to invest in children, only to be divorced and left to raise the
| child of your now No.1 enemy. If you're a man, the insecurity is
| around whether the child is yours and also whether your wife will
| later divorce you and your child be taken away from you (sure
| visitation rights, but pratically the child grows up in the
| household of another man, if she remarries).
| dyauspitr wrote:
| 75% of divorces are initiated by women in the US. If college
| educated that number jumps to 90%. Divorce as an mechanism, is
| almost entirely used by women.
| russdill wrote:
| The divorce mechanism is the legal end of the partnership.
| It's not an indication of who initiated the termination of
| the partnership itself.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Do you have evidence to back up the implict claim that
| those two are not strongly correlated?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Of course they're correlated but it's obvious to anyone
| who has had a long term relationship unravel that the
| causes are always complicated and multi-layered.
|
| I (man) was the one who pulled the trigger on my divorce
| but that followed years of conflict and withdrawing from
| both sides and ultimately you can point to specific
| milestones (who killed the bedroom, who opened a separate
| bank account first, who stepped out first, who wouldn't
| come back to counselling) but it's actually better for
| healing not to be preoccupied with the blame game and
| instead focus on where one's own growth opportunities
| are.
| CalRobert wrote:
| The question, of course, is whether that means women want
| divorce more, or men fear divorce more.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Anecdotally, men are a lot more content with marriage.
| Women want a lot more. The whole "healthy relationship"
| ecosystem in contemporary times is almost entirely women
| driven.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| A lot more men than women are able to be content with the
| comfortable mediocrity that is bringing in the paycheque,
| doing the chores, getting laid once or twice a month, but
| otherwise not really feeling much passion or enthusiasm
| or joy with their partner.
|
| It's not the life you hope for, but there's a lot of
| social messaging that that's just the way it is, it's
| what you signed up for, you would be selfish to leave,
| the grass won't be greener, and also it's probably your
| fault anyway for not being a better husband. The
| messaging to women in romcoms and the like is much more
| toward you deserve better, be brave, junk the loser, go
| get the life you want.
|
| As a guy who was in a mediocre marriage like this for
| many years, I basically got my emotional needs met
| elsewhere: through work, family, friends, time and
| activities with my kids, etc.
| kakacik wrote:
| Women absolutely want the divorce more once they come to
| conclusion some aspect of relationship is over (typically
| the emotion part but simply spending less time together or
| feeling most of the burden of raising kids is enough).
|
| 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.
| CalRobert wrote:
| They're often sexless though.
|
| Also it's often fear of stepdads. My mom dumped my dad so
| she could date a string of abusive assholes. It would
| give me pause before leaving a marriage that wasn't utter
| misery.
| voakbasda wrote:
| This does not surprise me, as the courts are flagrantly
| biased toward women in these matters. Almost without
| exception, they come out ahead in every measurable metric.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "as the courts are flagrantly biased toward women in these
| matters"
|
| As in most matters. There are many studies about lesser
| sentences for women vs men who commit the same crimes.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is not always exactly true if you dig into the details
| - for example, something like 20% of fathers get custody -
| but it's something like _90%_ of fathers who _try_ to get
| custody get some.
| bluGill wrote:
| How many don't even try though because them assume it is
| hopeless. Some custody includes things like 1 weekend a
| month - if that is all you get it wasn't really worth the
| bother.
| CalRobert wrote:
| "Some"?
|
| Anything less than fifty percent is state sponsored
| kidnapping.
| bell-cot wrote:
| From divorces among family & friends - yes, those concerns
| exist. But they are also worst-case scenarios, and there are
| many "friendlier" divorces. Or divorces after the kids grow up
| - where none of the paternity, left-to-raise, and visitation
| issues really apply.
|
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The paternity issue should be easy to overcome with modern
| technology. There's really no reason the state shouldn't
| require a paternity test to ensure the accuracy of the state
| issued birth certificate.
| bombcar wrote:
| Some states go the other way - if you (as the father, maybe
| the mother but that's pretty easy to verify I hear) sign the
| birth certificate _you are the father_ (Maury) for all legal
| purposes even if you 're not - wether knowingly or not.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yes, most states see it that way. But you could still make
| them the legal father through adoption (like with step
| parents) without providing inaccurate information on the
| birth certificate.
| em-bee wrote:
| isn't that fraud?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's all economic, pride and ego. Once you hit a certain amount
| of income, the marginal cost of children seems too much. It's
| not a big deal when you have nothing.
|
| Maintaining a middle/upper middle class lifestyle for your kids
| is expensive. Few people can afford daycare, 5x college
| tuitions, etc. Extended families tend to be spread out and
| social networks aren't what they once were.
|
| Dudes online blather about paternity, divorce, etc. all
| nonsense and all irrelevant. Bad marriages and divorce are not
| new, although religious and conservative people try to imply
| that. The entire movement for prohibition in the early 20th
| century was driven by absent fathers who would drink their
| wages away and let the children starve in some hovel.
|
| The only thing that's "new" is women have the ability to choose
| birth control.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| My view - for which I have no proofs, it's just intuition - is
| that people are too egotistic and self centered and too
| hedonistic to want to have children.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| I mean it makes sense, all you really need are cows and wives to
| turn sunshine into children. What more could a man need.
| M95D wrote:
| A lot of grass land for the cows.
| blfr wrote:
| _most people in the world don't and have never lived like
| Europeans_
|
| 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.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| These societies are the failed people we left behind.
|
| They're like the PHP developers of humankind. They limp on, but
| everyone else moved on a long time ago. If they were
| successful, they wouldn't still be doing it.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| The simpler explanation is that they continue to do it
| _because_ it _is_ successful.
| EnPissant wrote:
| >> most people in the world don't and have never lived like
| Europeans
|
| > 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.
|
| The revealed preference is that they want to continue to live
| the same way, but to do it in European countries as they are
| nicer places to live.
|
| The problem is that they are nicer places to live because
| "living like a European" is what produces these nicer places to
| live.
| bluGill wrote:
| > And fathers who wish to divorce assume that the mothers of
| their children will be fine raising children alone with the
| support of their family, the state, and their salaries.
|
| 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.
| Conscat wrote:
| Statistically, fathers who ask the courts for joint custody
| _almost always_ receive it. Occam 's Razor dictates these men
| you know most likely prefer to complain about their divorce
| rather than to do the arduous work of parenting. They can also
| renegotiate this circumstance if they feel like it.
| em-bee wrote:
| or the parents really just don't get along. seriously, i'd
| rather give up my kids than deal with a horrible partner. if
| i could deal with her, why even get a divorce (unless the
| partner pushes for it)? i am glad that my parents did not get
| joint custody when they divorced. it would have been a
| disaster.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Excellent submission. I particularly appreciate the lack of
| technical drama submissions on weekends. Again, this is a great
| read and a new favorite.
| hearsathought wrote:
| > For much of history, this complexity was invisible to
| Westerners. Northwestern Europeans assumed that their way of
| doing things, lifelong monogamous marriage sanctified by religion
| and nuclear families with male breadwinners, was the natural
| order.
|
| 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.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _For around 280,000 years, roughly 95 percent of our history as
| Homo sapiens, we lived as hunter-gatherers._
|
| OT, but I find this fact mindboggling whenever I read it.
|
| Our way of timekeeping and general education emphasizes the last
| 2 millennia. Popular (highschool level) history usually goes back
| maybe 5-8. The furthest is maybe the end of the ice age ~14
| millennia ago.
|
| But then you learn there are still _270_ millennia of human
| history left that we know almost nothing of...
| sdenton4 wrote:
| And the total human population in prehistory was tiny, likely
| under a million for much of that time, and possibly dropping to
| a few thousand at some point. The total human experience of
| those 250k years may not be much more than the last few
| thousand...
| xg15 wrote:
| Good point, and in a way even more crazy.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| This approach is correlational and interpretive. The same raw
| data points can be assembled into substantively different, even
| diametrically opposed, narratives depending on which mechanisms,
| confounders, or weighting someone wants to emphasise.
|
| Correlation is not causation. Just because they appear together
| doesn't mean the cows caused the marriage system. It could be
| that a third factor, like high male mortality in war prone
| herding societies, caused both.
|
| She ignores polyandry (one woman, multiple husbands) which occurs
| in some herding societies like Tibet. If "livestock = polygyny"
| was a hard scientific law, Tibet shouldn't exist as an exception.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > Monogamous systems, therefore, may have evolved to limit the
| transfer of resources, rather than as a form of monogamous
| mating.
|
| Usually, polygamous societies tended to become monogamous or
| perish. Most of the young men who couldn't afford wives could be
| send to war and die there. Else, they could become very violent
| very fast because they had nothing to lose.
| cornholio wrote:
| It's hard to believe such an in depth overview of the
| anthropology of marriage skips the massive elephant in the room:
| that polygynous societies were widely found to be in a perpetual
| state of civil war and seem unable to develop stable, modern
| institutions. When a substantial part of your young men have no
| chance of ever buying themselves a wife, the only way they can be
| recognized and respected as adult men is to join a militia that
| promises one, or at least gives them guns so they can aquire by
| force the cows they need.
|
| The corollary for western monogamous society should be clear:
| traditional marriage is not strictly repressive, it's also a form
| of egalitarianism and redistribution of social capital.
|
| If we dismantle marriage and let raw pastoralist dynamics run
| rampant, we might very well see the same hypergamous tendencies
| and that many of those excluded from the love market take up
| "other", less peaceful pastimes.
| buckle8017 wrote:
| This has already happened in a bunch of western countries to a
| limited extent.
|
| The incel people are this social dynamic.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It all makes sense when viewed through the economic lens.
|
| Sexual freedom is a lot like capitalism. It leads to wealth
| concentration. Very few men attract the majority of women.
| This implies a class of sexually poor men. I suppose so
| called incels rising up and trying to seize the means of
| reproduction is a predictable outcome.
|
| Many religions impose a sort of sexual communism: they try to
| stabilize society by imposing monogamous relationships,
| thereby ensuring availability of women for every man and
| preventing the accumulation of sexual capital. This
| explicitly counteracts the hypergamous dynamic mentioned in
| TFA where women would prefer to share a rich man than be in a
| monogamous relationship with a poor one.
| daymanstep wrote:
| If that's the case, then how comes China, which has a massive
| excess of males, hasn't erupted into civil war yet?
| buckle8017 wrote:
| Extremely effective social controls designed to suppress an
| insurrection for all the other reasons Chinese would have
| wanted to revolt over the years.
| cornholio wrote:
| China does not have a "massive" excess of males, just around
| 3-4% overall. The worst hit generations showed 15% more males
| than global averages, but this seems to be largely an
| administrative effect where girls were simply reported with a
| delay.
|
| That being said, China does face a bride price crisis
| (caili), that has reached tens of thousands of dollars, an
| exorbitant sum for the the rural areas where it is common.
| This has led to unrest and public pressure on the government
| to intervene and regulate this market.
| dzonga wrote:
| great article.
|
| one thing it mentions is how in Europe etc - places with limited
| land quickly pivoted to monogamy was due to limited resources. in
| places with limited resources, raising kids under monogamy has
| shown to produce the best results i.e kids tend to have better
| future success.
|
| however, even though legal systems in the west restrict polygyny
| - due to inequality - its coming back - we already see that with
| onlyfans etc / high levels of prostitution in younger western
| females - the richer guys can maintain a harem - while the plebs
| become sexless incels.
| poly2it wrote:
| I feel a source is warranted.
| rayiner wrote:
| > One thing became abundantly clear: most people in the world
| don't and have never lived like Europeans.
|
| Looking at marriage norms across the world actually suggests the
| opposite takeaway. What's remarkable is how _similar_ marriage
| norms are among people who had almost no historical contact with
| each other. Confucian marriage 2,000 years ago wasn't that
| different from Christian marriage 100 years ago, despite those
| two cultures having almost nothing else in common.
|
| When anthropologists identify societies with significantly
| different marriage norms, it's always some random tribal society
| that never grew beyond a relatively small number of people and
| never developed civilization to speak of.
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