veiled4allah: economists say the darnedest things

On the Economics of Polygyny (PDF) attempts to analyze polygyny (where one man has multiple wives) from a purely economic standpoint. It includes such statements as:

Assumption 1. All women in the marriage market have the same fertility function, f, which has the following properties: (i) f(0) = 0 and f is bounded from above by a finite number. (ii) For all r >= 0, f(r) >= 0 and f-(r) >= 0. (iii) There is some ^r >= 0 such that if 0 <= r <= ^r, then f=(r) >= 0 and if r >= ^r, then f=(r) <= 0.

After doing all the math, the author suggests the following conclusions:

A society that allows polygamy and stable property rights will usually have positive bride prices and some polygynous marriages. In such a society, bride prices will go not to the bride, but to her male relatives and all women be allocated the same amount of resources by their husbands. The greater the amount of material resources available per woman in the society, the higher will be bride prices and the greater the amount of resources allocated to each woman. However, in societies with sufficiently low amounts of resources per woman, instead of positive bride prices there will be dowries, which unlike bridewealth, are paid directly to the newly married couple. In such a society dowries will be of approximately the same size as the inheritance of males who marry.

Another take is provided by libertarian economist David Friedman in The Economics of Love and Marriage.

For a look at the demographics and economics of actual polygamous societies, see Polygyny and Poverty (PDF). This study concentrates on sub-Saharan Africa. Why?

When talking about polygyny, the countries that most people think of are (middle-Eastern) Islamic countries. But while marrying up to four wives is generally accepted in the Arab world, in practice polygyny is limited to a very small subgroup of the population in these countries. In Iran, only 1 percent of all married men have more than one wife, and in Jordan about 3.8% of all married men live in a polygynous union. What is perhaps less well known is that many Sub-Saharan African countries have much more wide-spread polygyny, with up to 50% of the male population being in a polygynous union. It is this second group that is the focus of this paper.

As an aside, I've been researching a few legal topics related to recognition of polygamous marriages in American courts and posting my findings to The Niqabi Paralegal. As it turns out, various American courts have been dealing with the question of whether to recognize polygamous marriages and for what purposes since the late 1880s. More than two-thirds of these cases deal with Native American marriages. Other cultures include Hindu, Sikh, Chinese, and Nigerian animist. None of the cases actually deal with Muslims. Odd, isn't it, for a practice so closely associated in the Western mind with Islam.

Whatever you think about polygamy, you would do well to look beyond Islam and at the many non-Muslim cultures that practice it. How does Muslim polygamy compare to non-Muslim polygamy? Is it better? Worse?

Finally, you can take a look at Christian polygamy.