Integrating economic and evolutionary approaches to polygynous marriage

Abstract

We outline the potential for integrating economic and evolutionary approaches to marriage and the family. Our broad argument is that the approaches share a concern for competition. Evolutionary scholars are concerned with the fitness consequences of competition and economists are centrally concerned with the nature of competition: how the allocation of scarce resources is mediated by potentially complex forms of social interaction and conflicts of interest. We illustrate our argument by focusing on conceptual and empirical approaches to a topic of interest to economists and evolutionary scholars: polygynous marriage. In comparing conceptual approaches, we distinguish between those that emphasize the physical environment and those that emphasize the social environment. We discuss some advantages of analyzing marriage through the lens of competitive markets, and outline some of the ways that economists analyze the emergence of rules governing the family. In discussing empirical approaches to polygynous marriage, we describe how a concern for informing contemporary policy leads economists to focus on the consequences of polygyny, and in particular we describe some of the ways in which economists attempt to distinguish causal effects from selection effects.

Gendered conflict in the human family

“…Here, adolescent girls entered marriages willingly, sometimes against parental wishes, but later come to regret the decision when the marriage failed to meet their expectations. Anderson & Bidner (2022) further address what may be gained by embracing the overlapping concerns of economics and evolutionary social science, taking polygynous marriage as a case study. Indeed, it is striking how much recent scholarship in economics addresses cultural variation in conflict between women and men, often drawing heavily on classic anthropological scholarship for theoretical inspiration.…”

“…However, as several papers in this special collection make clear, assumptions about the inherent harms of these practices are commonly made with little reference to evidence, opening up much scope for ethnocentric bias (see also Lawson & Gibson, in press). In cases such as child marriage (Baraka et al, 2022), bridewealth (Akurugu et al, 2022), arranged marriage (Agey et al, 2023), and polygynous marriage (Anderson & Bidner, 2022;Lawson & Gibson, 2018;Pesando, 2021), careful analyses present a more nuanced picture of the wellbeing (and fitness) implications of each practice. For example, some studies show that polygynous marriage is predictive of relatively poor health for women and their children, implicating resource competition and co-wife conflict (Omariba & Boyle, 2007;Strassmann, 2011), while others highlight apparent benefits for women, including greater access to male owned-wealth and https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2023.8 Published online by Cambridge University Press associated benefits of greater livelihood resilience which benefits all family members (Dessy et al, 2021;Lawson et al, 2015).…”

“…Indeed, it is striking how much recent scholarship in economics addresses cultural variation in conflict between women and men, often drawing heavily on classic anthropological scholarship for theoretical inspiration. For example, recent papers address the role of not only marriage practices (Anderson & Bidner, 2022 ), but also contemporary and historical modes of subsistence (e.g. Alesina et al, 2013 ; Becker, 2019 ; Hansen et al, 2015 ) and kinship systems (Lowes, 2020 ) in determining gender inequality.…”