Menace to Society
“I am firmly of the opinion that a large number of unmarried men, over the age of 24 years, is a dangerous element in any community.”
~ George Q. Cannon, 1878 [1]~
In case you haven’t kept up with the news in Canada, polygamy is currently under discussion in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, with authoritarian Mormon fundamentalist groups forming strange bedfellows with modern libertarian polyamorous ones in support of legalizing this form of marriage. However, a brief against the motion to de-criminalize polygamy was filed from a surprising source: Joseph Henrich, Chair of Culture, Cognition, and Evolution at the University of British Columbia—someone who has never published on the subject of polygamy before. His brief includes a 45-page paper on “Polygyny in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Theory and Implications.” You may have noticed that I referred to this brief at several points in my last post and cited it once. In this post I’ll be summarizing what Henrich argues concerning polygamy, its habit of creating pools of unmarried men, and the problems that causes for society.
How does polygamy create pools of unmarried men? To use the example offered by Henrich, let’s say that we have a group of 20 men and 20 women. The 12 wealthiest males get married once, leaving us with 8 unmarried men and 8 unmarried women. The top 5 men take a second wife, then the top 2 men take a third wife. Finally, the top man takes a fourth wife. This leaves us with a marriage pool that looks something like this:
| Man #1 | 4 Wives | Man #11 | 1 Wife |
| Man #2 | 3 Wives | Man #12 | 1 Wife |
| Man #3 | 2 Wives | Man #13 | Single |
| Man #4 | 2 Wives | Man #14 | Single |
| Man #5 | 2 Wives | Man #15 | Single |
| Man #6 | 1 Wife | Man #16 | Single |
| Man #7 | 1 Wife | Man #17 | Single |
| Man #8 | 1 Wife | Man #18 | Single |
| Man #9 | 1 Wife | Man #19 | Single |
| Man #10 | 1 Wife | Man #20 | Single |
In this table, 58% of marriages are monogamous and of the ones that are polygamous, only the two men in the top 10% income bracket have more than two wives. And yet, 40% of the male population is single. [2]
Why is it such a big deal if a higher percentage of men remain single? Namely, because George Q. Cannon was right. Large pools of unmarried men really are bad for society.
Marriage as a Prophylactic to Criminal Activity
Men are more inclined to criminal behavior than women are, and they’re particularly more inclined to commit violent crimes. A discussion of the reasons for this is beyond the scope of this post, but one only need observe the male-female ratio of prison inmates (6.6% female in 2000) to see that this is true.
Marriage has an interesting effect on the male crime rate in that married men are less likely to commit murder, robbery and rape than single men are. They’re also less likely to gamble and abuse drugs or alcohol than their single counterparts. Henrich notes that causality is difficult to determine in these cases. Perhaps men who aren’t inclined to those activities simply marry more because they make for more desirable spouses.
However, a study was done in 2006 which tracked the activities of men from a reform school at age 17 until age 70. Henrich explains:
Most subjects were married multiple times, which allows the researchers to compare their likelihood of committing a crime during married vs. unmarried periods of their lives. In this case, each individual is his own control. Across all crimes, marriage reduces a person’s likelihood of committing a crime by 35%. For property and violent crimes, marriage cuts the probability of committing a crime by half. When men divorce or are widowed, their crime rates go up. Supplementary analyses show that “good marriages” are even more prophylactic than average marriages, and that marrying a criminal wife has the opposite effect—of increasing a man’s likelihood of committing a crime . . . [3]
Another study done in 1995 using recall data from Nebraska inmates produced similar results, and even found that cohabiting with a girlfriend does not have the same effects as marriage. Cohabiting with a girlfriend either had no effect on crimes committed or increased them. [4] I would speculate that this shows that the offer of sex itself is no substitute for marriage in decreasing the crime rate. A polygynous society can not remedy the problems being outlined here by, say, increasing access to prostitutes.
Henrich notes several theories on the relationship between singleness and criminal activities in males. Evolutionary psychology comes into play again as he posits that males who lack socially acceptable access to potential mates engage in increasingly risky behavior in order to increase their chances of participating in marriage and mating. [5] He also notes the introduction of parenting responsibilities, a decline in unstructured activities with deviant peer groups, and the fact that “marriage creates interdependent systems of obligation, mutual support, and restraint that impose significant costs for translating criminal propensities into action” [6] all contribute to monogamy’s ability to decrease the crime rate.
But do polygynous societies really see an increase in crime?
Henrich thinks so. He cites an unpublished study from 2000 which assigned cultures with a number on a 4-point scale from highly monogamous (0) to highly polygamous (3), then measured how much of a country’s population was represented by that culture. The authors attempted to control for economic development, economic inequality, population density, and democracy. The results were that greater polygyny was associated with higher rates of murder, rape, assault and robbery, though only the rates of murder and rape were statistically significant. [7]
That same study then replaced its polygamy measure with a measure of the % of unmarried men in each country, with similar results. A higher ratio of unmarried men was found to be associated with higher rates of murder, rape, assault, and robbery, though only the rates of murder, rape and robbery were statistically significant. [8]
Finally, Henrich also consulted the data on countries with a high male-to-female ratio as a proxy for the effects of polygyny, which allowed him to avoid cross-national comparisons. The results were similar. For example, the sex ratio in China rose from 1.053 in 1988 to 1.095 in 2004, which nearly doubled the population of unmarried men. Simultaneously, crime rates in China nearly doubled. [9] Another example can be found in the Indian districts of Utter Pradesh and Kerala. The former has a murder ratio nearly twice that of the latter. What’s the difference? Utter Pradesh has a male-female ratio of 1.12. Kerala’s is 0.97. [10]
Conclusion
It’s important to note that in no way are single men a concern as individuals. It’s large groups of single men that create problems. There is a sizable amount of data correlating increases in crime to increases in the pool of unmarried men, and without a surplus female population to begin with, polygyny will only increase the population of unmarried men and subsequently the crime rate.
LDS apostle George Q. Cannon was correct in his concerns about high numbers of unmarried men. He simply never considered how his own practice of having five wives could contribute to the very problem he was trying to address.
As my previous post covered, there is no reason to believe there will ever be sufficient amounts of group marriage or polyandry to counter polygyny and soak up the pools of unmarried men it creates. It is possible to practice polygyny and still maintain enough potential spouses for everyone, if older polygamist men marry much younger women, and if the fertility rates for subsequent generations are dramatically increased. My next post will explore the problems with those options.
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Menace to Society — 15 Comments
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Additionally, when men are marrying very young wives, they will typically die before their wives, leaving groups of women to marry again.
The practice is much more sustainable than you have made it appear with your statistics above.