Posted by Kenneth Anderson:
Surplus of Males and Runaway (with the Bride-Price) Brides:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_05_31-2009_06_06.shtml#1244165240
The [1]WSJ has a story today that we are increasingly likely to hear
in some version. The one-child policy and preference for boys has led
to a well-documented shortages of marriageable women in China,
particularly in some parts. In this story, brides marry rural men,
extracting a bride-price, and then running away with the money. There
are other things that happen too - abductions of women in rural
villages, the renting out of a farmer's wife to other farmers who
cannot find wives. It is a social issue that is only now beginning to
hit adult Chinese society in full force. There is an extremely
important and good book on the implications of this surplus of males
in China, [2]Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's
Surplus Male Population, by Valerie Hudson and Andre den Boer (2004).
(Demographer Nicholas Eberstadt has written on the economic
implications of this for regions of China and India, as well as a
superb series - in Spanish, as it happens - on European health and
retirement, in the Madrid Revista de Libros.) As the WSJ article
notes:
Thanks to its 30-year-old population-planning policy and customary
preference for boys, China has one of the largest male-to-female
ratios in the world. Using data from the 2005 China census -- the
most recent -- a study published in last month's British Journal of
Medicine estimates there was a surplus of 32 million males under
the age of 20 at the time the census was taken. That's roughly the
size of Canada's population.
Now some of these men have reached marriageable age, resulting in
intense competition for spouses, especially in rural areas. It also
appears to have caused a sharp spike in bride prices and betrothal
gifts. The higher prices are even found in big cities such as
Tianjin.
A study by Columbia University economist Shang-Jin Wei found that
some areas in China with a high proportion of males have an
above-average savings rate, even after accounting for factors such
as education levels, income and life-expectancy rates. Areas with
more men than women, the study notes, also have low spending rates
-- suggesting that many rural Chinese may be saving up for bride
prices.
A moderate libertarian like me has read Heinlein, of course, and even
read long sections of [3]The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress aloud to his
adoring, or anyway somnolent, child until she took over and finished
it herself. So my operating assumption has generally been that a
shortage of females in a suitable place - a penal colony on the moon,
for example - would mean that women would be able to command a
suitably high marriage price, and contract for favorable plural
marriage conditions. My (lapsed) Mormon background rendered me quite
unoffended by the concept of plural marriage as such.
Exposure to the wider world, however, has left me persuaded that
abstract libertarianism must sometimes give way to the realities of
cultures and actual conditions. My view today is that - drawing on
conversations with Eberstadt in which he noted that he, too, had read
Heinlein - it was far more historically common, and almost certainly
the more common direction of things today, that in a world with
scarcity of women - especially in a world of scarcity of females and
yet a cultural preference for male births - the result would be
increased treatment of women as property. More valuable property, yes,
but increasingly as property precisely as the perception of its value
increased.
The authors of Bare Branches have noted that a surplus of males unable
to find mates is the social equivalent of plural marriage in which a
single male has exclusive reproductive access to multiple wives. The
effect is to create, as in China, India, and other places with similar
cultural patterns combined with modern technology, the imbalance in
the sexes. Again, my moderate libertarianism gives way to social
realities - no doubt informed by my Mormon upbringing, which left me
on the one hand the least offended person in the world by the idea of
polygamy, but on the other hand a very detailed understanding of what
it means in practice, for women but also for surplus men and boys.
Indeed, there is a very good and persuasive paper by Thom Brooks
arguing - contra Martha Nussbaum and others - that a society of
multiple wives and a single husband is inherently and necessarily an
inegalitarian one. Here is the SSRN abstract, courtesy Legal Theory
Blog:
Thom Brooks (Newcastle University - Newcastle Law School) has
posted [4]The Problem with Polygamy on SSRN.� Here is the
abstract:
�� Polygamy is a hotly contested practice and open to widespread
misunderstandings. This practice is defined as a relationship
between either one husband and multiple wives or one wife and
multiple husbands. Today, 'polygamy' almost exclusively takes the
form of one husband with multiple wives. In this article, my focus
will centre on limited defences of polygamy offered recently by
Chesire Calhoun and Martha Nussbaum. I will argue that these
defences are unconvincing. The problem with polygamy is primarily
that it is a structurally inegalitarian practice in both theory and
fact. Polygamy should be opposed for this reason.
The inequality that is baked into a society in which one husband has
multiple exclusive wives is perhaps not primarily or necessarily about
the wives, if one makes (extremely, fantastically heroic assumptions,
in actual social fact) about their freedom to choose, and if it
included the right to divorce not only the husband, but other wives
(however that might work in some idealized world). The intrinsic
inequality is about the mateless men, deprived of the opportunity to
even have a chance to marry and have families and children. I don't
recall offhand the numbers, but it only takes a quite small percentage
of men with three or four wives to create something approaching the
imbalances of regions of China or India. It is in a certain sense an
inequality far worse than mere economic inequality - although almost
always deeply embedded and intertwined with it.
The point is not that the mateless men have a right to have a wife,
but instead they ought, in an egalitarian society, to have a right to
be able to compete for one in the marriage market. Equality of
opportunity, not necessarily equality of result. And of course it goes
the other way around; a society in which large numbers of women were
deprived of the ability even to seek a mate would be equally
unattractive. The reality, however, as Brooks points out, is that
although one can talk about multiple husband societies, in actual
social practice and history it is extraordinarily rare, to the point
that it is more of a philosophical distraction than useful discussion.
But even framing the argument in this abstract way in a certain sense
misses the social reality - it is not really the right way to debate
the question, I think. The granular look at how these social
arrangements work in fact, on a large scale, and not as a matter of
abstract theory, is the proper starting place. Have there been any
decently economically egalitarian societies that have not been
relatively monogamous? And if so, what were they like?
This form of argument cuts against the libertarian grain, alas - but
having a pretty good sense of what the breakaway Mormon sects, the
fundamentalist Mormon sects in Arizona and Texas, actually do in
actual social practice ought to count for something. It is an argument
for taking the social realities of the fundamentalist Mormon groups
into account as well as abstract libertarian theory, and the same
being true for Muslim polygamy, or polygamy in other cultures and
societies being gradually brought into this one through the interflow
of populations.
References
1. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124415971813687173.html
2.
http://www.amazon.com/Bare-Branches-Implications-Population-International/dp/0262083256/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244161528&sr=8-1
3.
http://www.amazon.com/Moon-Harsh-Mistress-Robert-Heinlein/dp/0312863551/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244162120&sr=8-1
4. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1331492
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