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Watching HBO’s Big Love, a fictional series on a polygamist family in Utah, has raised a couple issues in my mind on the social implications of polygamy especially as they relate to America today. The show, now in its second season, portrays a suburban family in Utah that practices plural marriage. In it the male figurehead, Bill Hendrickson (Bill Paxton), a successful owner of a local home improvement retailer called Home-Plus, rediscovers the fundamentalist teachings of Mormonism after practicing monogamy for 12 years and takes on an additional two wives with the approval of his first/legal wife, Barbra.

While the family’s life is hectic and full of commitment, they are genuinely happy and well provided for. And you have to figure that the ability to provide a comfortable standard of life was an attractive quality to Niki and Margene (Bill’s second and third wives) when they chose to marry Bill–especially Margene who had no Mormon, not to mention Polygamist, connections before she met Bill.

The fact of the matter is that when people marry their decision to do so is incentive based, and one of those incentives is wealth. Moreover, so long as marriage is incentive based (be those incentives looks, kindness, humor, values etc.) there will be both a demand and supply aspect of relationships. At face value that may seam a little strange, but then again we live in a society where there is essentially an equal amount of men and women and where most people’s values lead them towards just one person. But in places like the Northern Mariana Islands (which is a US Commonwealth) where the population is only 80,000 and the ratio of males to females is only 77 to every 100 there could be benefits from allowing polygamy. In war ravaged areas like Chechnya (which obviously does not apply to the US) where large numbers of men were killed in war, polygamy could also make sense.

Look at it this way, if demand exceeds supply for men in a given place, it means that the “price” of men also goes up. A higher “price” would mean that the average woman would need to give the average man more incentive to marry him than the other way around. It many also mean that a woman, in order to get a certain man, would be more likely to have to marry a man with a more crowded marital status. Disallowing polygamy in areas such as the Mariana Isles and Chechnya–as any fiscal price ceiling would cause–results in a glut of unmarried women which may only lead to greater unhappiness and more poverty among women. I am not suggesting that polygamy be promoted or forced upon certain domains. Simply, the point is that polygamy would provide certain people with more mobility and choice in marriage.

Now turn the issue on its head and consider a small country like Qatar where much of the population consists of male expatriates, many of them permanent residents. Their male/female ratio, at 182 per every 100, is the definition of “sausage-fest”. There, there is a ridiculous glut of men and the price for women is obviously very high. Now considering the strong Islamic background of the culture, it is very unlikely that any two men would chose to marry the same woman but if you replace the Islamic zeitgeist with something akin to Amsterdam or San Francisco, it would be no surprise to find an emerging impetus for matriarchal polygamy. But still the reality remains that in Qatar, as well as small Arab nations like the UAE and Kuwait, the demand for women far exceeds men and that has economic implications such that women can be far more demanding in their incentive based choices for husbands, or that a man may have to pay a woman’s family to take her hand in marriage (not the traditional dowry which is the other way around).

Going back to incentives, let’s look at the potential for polygamy in another way. Consider individuals who are exceptionally good looking or wealthy or charismatic or the like, surely there are many people who would be willing to share some of the exceptional person rather than have 100% of the best they can get. Take a Tom Cruise for instance (because we all know that he practices strange things like polygamy…or whatever). Mr. Cruise is wealthy, famous, and handsome (according to many women, of course I am not speaking for myself) and there are probably scores of women who would settle for being one of his wives in exchange for whatever unusual pleasure surrounds being Cruise’s wife. Or imagine simply a very wealthy person, there are certainly many people who would rather have a quarter of a billionaire than a whole of a person with a modest income.

The goal of looking at polygamy from this point of view is to recognize that by giving people choice and allowing the “love market” to find its equilibrium, the likelihood of people finding happiness is optimized. Obviously, the vast majority of people would never choose polygamy in accordance to their personal values, but for those who polygamy may be a good choice for it is practical to give them the option to explore that avenue. 

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The Politics, Economics, and Big Love (part I) by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.