Wasn't it about inheritance? As a hunter-gatherer there's little to inherit. Once you own a field, the inheritance suddenly matters. You wan to keep it in the family. But with serial monogamy the concept of family gets blurry.
Per Greg Clark's "A Farewell to Alms", the one group in Malthusian England able to maintain/increase their numbers were precisely those farmers wealthy enough to leave inheritable property. He extensively researched probate records & surnames.
I think that's valid, and it's going to generate a concern over validating paternity that probably doesn't exist in hunter-gatherer societies. A woman always knows the kid is hers, and a hunter-gatherer father is likely ok that the kid is most probably his but certainly one of his relatives but a farmer father is going to want to know with a higher degree of certainty that he's not working to support another man's kid. Almost more importantly, his mother is going to want to know the same thing since that's how she's going to be supported.
Once fertility is more or less given, in an agricultural society men do take female wealth and competence very much into account. Particularly, if one can have just one wife.
A minor point: foragers' pair-bonds are not remarkable for their transience (although a "few years" seems to be on the short side) but by their variability. One of my mentors, anthropologist Daniel Everett, told me about the Amazonian group he studied: "Couples mostly practice serial monogamy; if there are extra-pair partnerships, both parties can be jealous and angry. Some relationships are a few months, some a few years and some couples have been together decades, the entire time I've known them."
Any societal feature that gives a woman a reason to need a man will, all things being equal, promote partnering. In the forager era it was resources (meat) and physical safety, and then farming societies added on legal and income benefits.
Most of these reasons to have a husband have gone away. Husbands have become – like children – more nice to haves than necessities. To sustain a woman's respect, a man now needs to be intrinsically more capable than his female partner – and when the playing field is level then mathematically most men cannot do this.
Farming did not create monogamy, Christianity did (and influenced Judaism to follow suit). Muslim and animist farmers can have multiple wives. In China plural marriage was common until it was outlawed in the 20th Century.
Doesn't today's society drift towards hunters and gatherers? Perhaps many of us travel the world, collecting the most fruitful job opportunities and hunting for the fattest investment opportunities.
When thinking about what causes women to lose respect for men, two things come to mind:
- the trend that men are now less educated than women, so women might tend to end up with men they don’t respect intellectually
- Jonathan Haidt’s latest research which focuses on how men have been hurt by “the internet”. (For women, it’s well researched that social media increases anxiety and depression) He believes that essentially men have been turned into gambling zombies, throughly lotteries hidden inside video games and straight up gambling websites. Another thing women probably find pathetic. Your man isn’t making money out in the real world, he’s a boy addicted to video games.
The 2010 book Sex at Dawn by Cacilda Jethá and Christopher Ryan got me thinking about the origin of monogamy. The concept has remained stable in my mind for many years. Which means that I buy the concept that the invention of agriculture changed the way humans lived. What followed was a population explosion that continues to this day. The source of all of our contemporary joys and sadness.
The liberation of women really got rolling, by my reckoning, when clinical medicine grew to the point that dying during childbirth got to be a rare occurrence. As the graph of opportunity continues to flatten out so that personal determination and not gender determines eventual success; pair bonding is in the throws of a new evolution.
Never having been the breadwinner type I vote for enjoying a person’s company, as a whole person, being the common format leading to long term, mid and short term coupling. Economic factors becoming of little consequence. I have always been attracted to intelligent witty women, not that I have known many like that.
Parkinson’s variant: psychosocial competence expands to fill power deficits. Women developed superior social competence when that was their only leverage.
Compared to hunter gatherers, farmers are much more heavily reliant on those to whom they are bonded for survival, not just for rearing children. Farming successfully over a lifetime requires fulfilling many commitments lasting weeks, months, and years, consistently, in ways that hunter-gatherer societies didn't need.
Women are turned on by powerful men. Our culture taught our males to be more sensitive, not powerful. Farmers are strong and therefore masculine.Really very simple.
I think you over generalize with "farming society". Different types of agriculture societies see huge differences too. In plow cultures, men's physical strength is required to work the land. It supports very high population densities, but also meant that women cannot provide food for themselves. In hoe(and forager cultures), where labour required less physical strength, women were able to provide food for themselves.
I think what limited women were induced to tolerate men in plow societies because women knew they needed to or else they and their children would starve. Sexism and roles aren't as important.
Instead of trying to tack on an artifical "lifelong monogamy" module in a time when men and women are more equal, which everyone will hate and fight against if it involves raising men in status and lowering women in status, why not adopt the carefree short-term serial monogamish dynamic that worked for a more egalitarian 2M years?
Marriage is a bad idea, fully generally. At least 2/3 of them fail (42% vintage divorce rates, then at least half again "at least one party is net unhappy").
If either of you have any assets, you're betting half of them on something with a 2/3 failure rate, and prenups are thrown out for essentially vibes reasons very often (if they have a good lawyer, gross inequality - totally subjective, or changed circumstances - again subjective, or because you left out something dumb like a 401k account from 3 jobs ago).
Like, what are you actually gaining from a marriage? The male marriage bonus? Here's a tip - if you're a man you can just *decide* to work harder and eat better and exercise more, without actuarially giving away half your net worth. And if you're a woman, it's a bad idea because 70% of divorces are initiated by women!
Did I mention that Turnic 2024, a meta analysis with ~200k couples and ~100k matched singles across 18 countries, shows a very strong effect size of marriage on obesity - 1.7 odds ratio, with up to 2.5 odds ratio in economic downturns. Marriage makes you fat, too!
Of course this is really probably about the Fertility Crisis, as marriage is closely correlated with TFR.
But the solution shouldn't be "let's set women down a peg in status so they'll marry average bozos again," it should be raising men UP. Lack of respect happens because most men suck, and are lazy, and don't actually merit respect.
Let's open up gengineering, there's a ton of SNP's that can drive big results basically tomorrow. If the quality of men sucks so much no woman wants to marry or have kids with them, we shouldn't try to lower standards, we should try to raise the bar!
Myostatin knockouts, height genes, ambition genes, "sleep 2 hrs less" genes, and more! You can make CVD risk 80% lower with an SNP! You can turn off body odor! We even have a few associated with self employment and higher number of children!
That’s actually false. Your point would stand if it was “if everyone is high status, no one is high status”. But since it’s only men, they could still be high status compared to women, and thus have their respect. Men wouldn’t change their status compared to other men, but compared to women.
A similar effect is at play with beauty and women. Women are shown to be more beautiful than men. And studies show men are more satisfied in their marriage when their woman is more beautiful than they are. Well if you kept raising women’s beauty level, sure it wouldn’t help one woman vs the next, but it would increase women’s beauty relative to men, and more men would be satisfied.
It’s the same argument for increasing men’s status.
Your model seems to be a zero sum "relative gap between men and women drives marriage willingness" model. But the ~2M years of relative egalitarianism kind of gives the lie to that, right? People still paired up in those circumstances.
My model is an absolute "women can now have nice careers and Netflix and apps and a pet, and those are more fulfilling than dating and marrying average men."
In other words, an absolute threshold men have fallen below, due to better substitutes. If you raise men above the "Netflix and Tik Tok alternative" then more men will be marriagable.
There is no reason to actually expect that you will boost men up above a standard that you yourself acknowledged increased with technology (and should thus be expected to continue to increase with further tech advances.).
But equally, there's no reason to expect that society at large and women in particular are going to be aligned with anything that seriously lowers women's status and raises men's.
Most women will be against it, and I'd assume most left-inclined men would, too. Most married people will be against it, too, because of typical spousal dynamics (smarter to keep the wife happy).
I think the gengineering is legitimately the easier lift, because we've actually been able to put SNP's into primates for about 10 years already, everyone is just reluctant to do it to humans. The technology is there, but not the will.
Also you didn't make this point, but Robin pointed out it would improve both women and men - there are many things that are more attractive in men than women (height, muscularity / low body fat, ambition, dominance, etc).
The reason not to adopt a carefree dynamic is that it would result in below-replacement fertility. The groups resisting the trend toward below-replacement fertility the most are insular religious cultures which restrict sexuality via marriage. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-return-of-communism
This just sounds to me like "the reason not to <do the thing literally every society is doing> is because it will result in <thing that is happening in literally every society>," so we should do something some tiny slice of the world does who are different in practically every relevant way.
Sure, if you have cultural levers that can reliably steer everyone in the world on about 20-50 different parameters to herd them all into this tiny "insular religious culture space," then I guess you could try that. Even then, I don't think it would be a good idea. Who would YOU trust with those levers, besides yourself?? Certainly not any politicians.
But that's impossible. The real solution MUST be technological or legislative, because we literally can't DO "cultural engineering" at any scale. Nobody is capable of it, at all! We don't even have a good theoretical framework of how to do it!
And the cultural / legislative paths where you're trying to knock women down are never going to pass in democracies, which are the majority of the world. I don't think they could successfully do it even in China, and East Asia is bearing the brunt of the worst of the fertility crisis.
My personal favorite ideas that might actually move the needle are going "space race" funding on uterine replicators, and going for big incentives. I outlined some ideas in a post here:
But ultimately, all TFR interventions are fighting a difficult rearguard action, because the REASONS fertility are down are many and varied, and each one contributes. Single levers being pulled here and there just can't do much in an environment like that, which is largely homeostatic and adaptive in terms of the overall trend maintaining itself (ie growing up in single child households becomes more normal, large families are rarer, accommodations for kids in most public spaces declines, etc), and this is why any interventions show short-term improvements that generally die out after a few years.
Wasn't it about inheritance? As a hunter-gatherer there's little to inherit. Once you own a field, the inheritance suddenly matters. You wan to keep it in the family. But with serial monogamy the concept of family gets blurry.
Most farming era folks had little to inherit as well.
Per Greg Clark's "A Farewell to Alms", the one group in Malthusian England able to maintain/increase their numbers were precisely those farmers wealthy enough to leave inheritable property. He extensively researched probate records & surnames.
How about land?
I think that's valid, and it's going to generate a concern over validating paternity that probably doesn't exist in hunter-gatherer societies. A woman always knows the kid is hers, and a hunter-gatherer father is likely ok that the kid is most probably his but certainly one of his relatives but a farmer father is going to want to know with a higher degree of certainty that he's not working to support another man's kid. Almost more importantly, his mother is going to want to know the same thing since that's how she's going to be supported.
AFAIK, male attraction is more to beauty and youth (implying fertility) than beauty and intimacy.
Once fertility is more or less given, in an agricultural society men do take female wealth and competence very much into account. Particularly, if one can have just one wife.
A minor point: foragers' pair-bonds are not remarkable for their transience (although a "few years" seems to be on the short side) but by their variability. One of my mentors, anthropologist Daniel Everett, told me about the Amazonian group he studied: "Couples mostly practice serial monogamy; if there are extra-pair partnerships, both parties can be jealous and angry. Some relationships are a few months, some a few years and some couples have been together decades, the entire time I've known them."
Ok, I edited to add the variability point.
Any societal feature that gives a woman a reason to need a man will, all things being equal, promote partnering. In the forager era it was resources (meat) and physical safety, and then farming societies added on legal and income benefits.
Most of these reasons to have a husband have gone away. Husbands have become – like children – more nice to haves than necessities. To sustain a woman's respect, a man now needs to be intrinsically more capable than his female partner – and when the playing field is level then mathematically most men cannot do this.
Farming did not create monogamy, Christianity did (and influenced Judaism to follow suit). Muslim and animist farmers can have multiple wives. In China plural marriage was common until it was outlawed in the 20th Century.
Multiple wives were rare; most men had only no more than one.
Mathematically, most men couldn't have multiple wives.
No, Christianity inherited that norm from Roman civilization.
Doesn't today's society drift towards hunters and gatherers? Perhaps many of us travel the world, collecting the most fruitful job opportunities and hunting for the fattest investment opportunities.
Nice piece.
When thinking about what causes women to lose respect for men, two things come to mind:
- the trend that men are now less educated than women, so women might tend to end up with men they don’t respect intellectually
- Jonathan Haidt’s latest research which focuses on how men have been hurt by “the internet”. (For women, it’s well researched that social media increases anxiety and depression) He believes that essentially men have been turned into gambling zombies, throughly lotteries hidden inside video games and straight up gambling websites. Another thing women probably find pathetic. Your man isn’t making money out in the real world, he’s a boy addicted to video games.
Farmers live in a much more settled environment. If you are on the move, there is a constant give and take.
The 2010 book Sex at Dawn by Cacilda Jethá and Christopher Ryan got me thinking about the origin of monogamy. The concept has remained stable in my mind for many years. Which means that I buy the concept that the invention of agriculture changed the way humans lived. What followed was a population explosion that continues to this day. The source of all of our contemporary joys and sadness.
The liberation of women really got rolling, by my reckoning, when clinical medicine grew to the point that dying during childbirth got to be a rare occurrence. As the graph of opportunity continues to flatten out so that personal determination and not gender determines eventual success; pair bonding is in the throws of a new evolution.
Never having been the breadwinner type I vote for enjoying a person’s company, as a whole person, being the common format leading to long term, mid and short term coupling. Economic factors becoming of little consequence. I have always been attracted to intelligent witty women, not that I have known many like that.
Robin has discussed that book earlier:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/sex-at-dusk-v-sex-at-dawnhtml
I wonder if it's as simple as farmers having less social time.
Parkinson’s variant: psychosocial competence expands to fill power deficits. Women developed superior social competence when that was their only leverage.
Compared to hunter gatherers, farmers are much more heavily reliant on those to whom they are bonded for survival, not just for rearing children. Farming successfully over a lifetime requires fulfilling many commitments lasting weeks, months, and years, consistently, in ways that hunter-gatherer societies didn't need.
Women are turned on by powerful men. Our culture taught our males to be more sensitive, not powerful. Farmers are strong and therefore masculine.Really very simple.
I think you over generalize with "farming society". Different types of agriculture societies see huge differences too. In plow cultures, men's physical strength is required to work the land. It supports very high population densities, but also meant that women cannot provide food for themselves. In hoe(and forager cultures), where labour required less physical strength, women were able to provide food for themselves.
https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/09/13/hoe-culture.html
Yes of course there are many distinctions that I didn't mention, but I don't see the relevance of that distinction for the point I was trying to make.
I think what limited women were induced to tolerate men in plow societies because women knew they needed to or else they and their children would starve. Sexism and roles aren't as important.
Why fight against ~2M years of hominin evolution?
Instead of trying to tack on an artifical "lifelong monogamy" module in a time when men and women are more equal, which everyone will hate and fight against if it involves raising men in status and lowering women in status, why not adopt the carefree short-term serial monogamish dynamic that worked for a more egalitarian 2M years?
Marriage is a bad idea, fully generally. At least 2/3 of them fail (42% vintage divorce rates, then at least half again "at least one party is net unhappy").
If either of you have any assets, you're betting half of them on something with a 2/3 failure rate, and prenups are thrown out for essentially vibes reasons very often (if they have a good lawyer, gross inequality - totally subjective, or changed circumstances - again subjective, or because you left out something dumb like a 401k account from 3 jobs ago).
Like, what are you actually gaining from a marriage? The male marriage bonus? Here's a tip - if you're a man you can just *decide* to work harder and eat better and exercise more, without actuarially giving away half your net worth. And if you're a woman, it's a bad idea because 70% of divorces are initiated by women!
Did I mention that Turnic 2024, a meta analysis with ~200k couples and ~100k matched singles across 18 countries, shows a very strong effect size of marriage on obesity - 1.7 odds ratio, with up to 2.5 odds ratio in economic downturns. Marriage makes you fat, too!
Of course this is really probably about the Fertility Crisis, as marriage is closely correlated with TFR.
But the solution shouldn't be "let's set women down a peg in status so they'll marry average bozos again," it should be raising men UP. Lack of respect happens because most men suck, and are lazy, and don't actually merit respect.
Let's open up gengineering, there's a ton of SNP's that can drive big results basically tomorrow. If the quality of men sucks so much no woman wants to marry or have kids with them, we shouldn't try to lower standards, we should try to raise the bar!
Myostatin knockouts, height genes, ambition genes, "sleep 2 hrs less" genes, and more! You can make CVD risk 80% lower with an SNP! You can turn off body odor! We even have a few associated with self employment and higher number of children!
Genetic engineering would likely improve both men and women, and thus not improve men relative to women.
Also, if all men are high status, no men are high status. Status is a relative not absolute attribute.
That’s actually false. Your point would stand if it was “if everyone is high status, no one is high status”. But since it’s only men, they could still be high status compared to women, and thus have their respect. Men wouldn’t change their status compared to other men, but compared to women.
A similar effect is at play with beauty and women. Women are shown to be more beautiful than men. And studies show men are more satisfied in their marriage when their woman is more beautiful than they are. Well if you kept raising women’s beauty level, sure it wouldn’t help one woman vs the next, but it would increase women’s beauty relative to men, and more men would be satisfied.
It’s the same argument for increasing men’s status.
Your model seems to be a zero sum "relative gap between men and women drives marriage willingness" model. But the ~2M years of relative egalitarianism kind of gives the lie to that, right? People still paired up in those circumstances.
My model is an absolute "women can now have nice careers and Netflix and apps and a pet, and those are more fulfilling than dating and marrying average men."
In other words, an absolute threshold men have fallen below, due to better substitutes. If you raise men above the "Netflix and Tik Tok alternative" then more men will be marriagable.
There is no reason to actually expect that you will boost men up above a standard that you yourself acknowledged increased with technology (and should thus be expected to continue to increase with further tech advances.).
Sure, it's definitely a Red Queen's Race.
But equally, there's no reason to expect that society at large and women in particular are going to be aligned with anything that seriously lowers women's status and raises men's.
Most women will be against it, and I'd assume most left-inclined men would, too. Most married people will be against it, too, because of typical spousal dynamics (smarter to keep the wife happy).
I think the gengineering is legitimately the easier lift, because we've actually been able to put SNP's into primates for about 10 years already, everyone is just reluctant to do it to humans. The technology is there, but not the will.
Also you didn't make this point, but Robin pointed out it would improve both women and men - there are many things that are more attractive in men than women (height, muscularity / low body fat, ambition, dominance, etc).
The reason not to adopt a carefree dynamic is that it would result in below-replacement fertility. The groups resisting the trend toward below-replacement fertility the most are insular religious cultures which restrict sexuality via marriage. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-return-of-communism
This just sounds to me like "the reason not to <do the thing literally every society is doing> is because it will result in <thing that is happening in literally every society>," so we should do something some tiny slice of the world does who are different in practically every relevant way.
Sure, if you have cultural levers that can reliably steer everyone in the world on about 20-50 different parameters to herd them all into this tiny "insular religious culture space," then I guess you could try that. Even then, I don't think it would be a good idea. Who would YOU trust with those levers, besides yourself?? Certainly not any politicians.
But that's impossible. The real solution MUST be technological or legislative, because we literally can't DO "cultural engineering" at any scale. Nobody is capable of it, at all! We don't even have a good theoretical framework of how to do it!
And the cultural / legislative paths where you're trying to knock women down are never going to pass in democracies, which are the majority of the world. I don't think they could successfully do it even in China, and East Asia is bearing the brunt of the worst of the fertility crisis.
My personal favorite ideas that might actually move the needle are going "space race" funding on uterine replicators, and going for big incentives. I outlined some ideas in a post here:
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/high-human-capital-fertility-interventions?r=17hw9h
But ultimately, all TFR interventions are fighting a difficult rearguard action, because the REASONS fertility are down are many and varied, and each one contributes. Single levers being pulled here and there just can't do much in an environment like that, which is largely homeostatic and adaptive in terms of the overall trend maintaining itself (ie growing up in single child households becomes more normal, large families are rarer, accommodations for kids in most public spaces declines, etc), and this is why any interventions show short-term improvements that generally die out after a few years.