The Price of Everything (13 page)

Americans have not always worked more than everybody else. In the 1970s European workers labored more than their counterparts in the United States. Some economists suggest higher tax rates in Europe discouraged work there. Others point to stronger unions that pushed social democratic governments in Europe to create more leisure time, including mandated holidays and shorter workweeks. In the late 1990s, the French Assembly passed the thirty-five-hour workweek as a strategy to combat unemployment—based on the idea that more people would work if each worker labored fewer hours. While the effort failed to promote job growth, it did give workers more time off.

Olivier Blanchard, the French chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, who spent much of his professional career in the United States, argues that Europe and the United States made different choices as they became richer and more productive. Americans chose to deploy their higher productivity to earn more money and buy more goods and services. Europeans “spent it” on more leisure time and more time working on household chores.

Many economists will understand these choices as rational manifestations of different preferences. The French chose time and the Americans money because they preferred it. Their choices should make them both happy. But there is another possible reading: Americans chose an unhappier path.

Some of the same studies that show Americans stuck in a happiness rut since the end of World War II suggest that the French have become happier with their lot. The French work 440 hours a year fewer than Americans partly because they take seven weeks’ vacation, compared with fewer than four in the United States. They sleep the longest of all citizens of the industrial world. They spend two and a quarter hours a day on meals, an hour more than in the United States. And they devote almost an hour a day more to leisure than Americans do.

French women spend more than twice as much time as Americans on meals and almost 50 percent more on active leisure—like doing sports or going to shows. American women spend about 10 percent more time working and a third more on passive leisure activities like watching TV. As it turns out, Americans like the French life better than their own. Researchers found that if American women were to reorganize their days to spend time as the French do, they wouldn’t be quite as happy as the French, but they would be happier than they are with the lives they lead.

The conclusion to be drawn from the American happiness paradox is not that money cannot increase happiness. It can. It simply underscores that money is not the only relevant variable. Happiness can be purchased in other currencies too. It can be bought with love. It can be bought with time. And pursuing growth at all costs can lead us to sacrifice other components of our happiness.

You can trust Mexican soaps. In the 1990s, the Mexican television network Televisa tried to replicate the success of
The Rich Also Weep
with a remake that they titled
María la del Barrio
or
María of the Hood.
Perhaps to address the original’s hopeless naïveté, or a new understanding of the world, the writers gave the heroine, now named María Hernández de la Vega, a new line: “I know the rich also weep,” she said. “But the poor weep more.”

I SOMETIMES WONDER
why polygamy has such a bad reputation. We frown upon it as a barbarous practice of the past, when rich men would amass harems to produce herds of children and women could be bought and sold like livestock. Ninety percent of Americans think polygamy is morally wrong, according to a Gallup poll, more than those opposing cloning humans, abortion, or the death penalty. In most of the world monogamous marriage is the norm.

But strict monogamy has been historically rare. In fact, polygamy—when men have more than one wife at the same time, or a wife and several concubines—has been popular across human history. It thrived in the great empires of the past, among kings and emperors who could afford many mates. It was common practice among the powerful in Zoroastrian Iran, the Egypt of the pharaohs, and in the Aztec and Inca empires. King Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Yet according to the Bible this troubled God only because many weren’t Hebrew but Moabite, Ammonite, Hittite, and so on, and had their own deities. Polygamy was banned from Ashkenazi Judaism only in the synod convoked by Gershom ben Judah around the year 1000 of our era.

From the 1960s to the 1980s the anthropologist George Murdock compiled a so-called Ethnographic Atlas, recording customs and practices in nearly 1,200 societies, both ancient and contemporary. Polygamy was prevalent in 850. Similarly anthropologists surveying 172 western North American Indian societies in the 1960s and 1970s reported that polygamy was only absent or very rare in 28.

Polygamy was legal in Japan until 1880 and in India until 1955, when it was banned for Hindus but not for Muslims. In the United States, the Mormon Church only disavowed the practice around the turn of the twentieth century under intense pressure from the United States Congress, which disincorporated the Church and seized its assets in 1887. Even in the 1980s, scholars estimated that about 10 percent of the world’s population lived in polygamous societies. Today, taking more than one wife is still common in parts of the Middle East, in much of Africa—from the Sahel in the north to a band crossing from Senegal in the west to Tanzania in the east—and among Mormon breakaway sects in the American West.

Polygamy is in our genes. Geneticists studying genetic variation in populations in China, France, Africa, and the South Pacific found that females passed down more genetic variety than males to their offspring, suggesting that more females than males managed to breed successfully. That fits a typical marker of polygamy: rich men mate a lot with lots of different women; poor men breed very little or not at all.

In his essay on polygamy and divorce, the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume blasted polygamy as unnatural: “This sovereignty of the male is a real usurpation, and destroys that nearness of rank, not to say equality, which nature has established between the sexes.” But in 1979, more than two hundred years later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that Iran’s “law of the four wives is a very progressive law, and was written for the good of women since there are more women than men.” Polygamy, he concluded, “is better than monogamy.”

 

 

IT MIGHT SEEM
odd to bring the invisible hand of the market to bear on the most intimate transactions between men and women. But there is an economic rationale for these mating arrangements. It has to do with the relatively low cost of sperm.

Prices are on prominent display in the most intimate transaction that we know. In the market for mates, prices are attached to different things—husbands and wives rather than diamonds or sound systems. But they perform essentially the same task as they do on the supermarket shelf, allocating resources to maximize an associated benefit. In this particular market the benefit consists mostly of surviving children.

Darwin’s theory of sexual selection posits that the first, most important driver of behavior—of humans or animals—is the imperative to pass genes down to future generations. In a world in which males need only invest a dollop of sperm in this endeavor, while females must produce an egg, carry, and nourish the embryo, it is only natural that mates would have asymmetrical reproduction strategies.

In the natural world this means that for males the ideal system would allow them to plant their seed in as many females as possible. Females, whose fertility is constrained by the enormous cost of bearing offspring, would have less use for multiple males. They would choose quality instead, males who could provide resources to help ensure that the next generation survived.

These are not the only considerations shaping the mating arrangement. Female bonobo apes are extraordinarily promiscuous. They have lots of sex, with whichever male happens to be around. Researchers suggest this behavior evolved as a strategy to avoid infanticide. Males would kill unrelated babies so their mothers would stop breast-feeding and recover their fertility. Indiscriminate sex ensured that a male could never be sure whether the kid was his.

Mating strategies are influenced by all sorts of ecological constraints—ranging from the abundance of food to the density of the population. Many species of birds establish stable monogamous relationships—an arrangement that reduces competition between females and ensures that males collaborate closely in the rearing of their offspring. But bird adultery is common—as males try to wriggle out of their marital strictures to maximize their reproduction potential while females try to find males with better genes than those of their faithful mates.

Still, the asymmetry between male and female investments in reproduction sheds light on many sexual mores. It helps explain, for instance, why cheating husbands usually choose women who are younger than their wives while cheating wives choose men who are more educated than their husbands. Men are most interested in women’s curves—a measure of their reproductive abilities—while women are most interested in men’s earning power—a measure of their command of resources. The asymmetry also explains why in many societies across the span of human history women have had a price.

 

 

POLYGAMY IS BRED
of inequality. Polygamy is rare in subsistence societies, where resources are scarce, because males cannot sustain multiple females. And if all men are equally poor, women have little cause to choose to be the second wife of one man rather than the first wife of another. Polygamy became prevalent because it allowed economically successful men to extend their success to the market for reproduction, planting their seed in several mates. It also allowed more than one woman to mate with the most resourceful man and share his successful genes. This combination of incentives bred a market in which women sold reproductive services for men to bid for. The most resourceful men could offer more. This often led husbands to pay for their brides.

Roughly two thirds of the societies recorded in Murdock’s atlas feature payment for the bride. Among them are the Kipsigis, a polygamous society of herders and farmers in Kenya. The anthropologist Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, who studied the group in the 1980s and 1990s, found that each extra wife added 6.6 children to a man’s fertility. This fecundity—added to women’s contribution in labor to household income—commanded a price, usually paid by the groom to the bride’s family. From the 1960s to the early 1980s the average price for a Kipsigi bride was six cows, six goats, and eight hundred Kenyan shillings. For a man of average wealth, this amounted to one third of his cows, half his goats, and two months’ salary.

Yet prices followed the ebb and flow of supply and demand. Borgerhoff Mulder reported that bride prices declined in the 1970s and 1980s as land became scarcer and men had to wait longer to accumulate enough wealth to marry. Since Kipsigi men marry younger women, the wait tilted the ratio of males to females further in men’s favor. Moreover, it increased the opportunity for women to have kids out of wedlock, reducing their subsequent bridal price.

Polygamy can be problematic. It can entrench poverty, diverting productive capital into the bridal market. It encourages men to have large numbers of children, reducing the resources available to invest in their education. One study suggested that banning the practice in Africa would lead to a 40 percent drop in fertility, a 70 percent increase in national savings, and a 170 percent increase in economic output per head. But that doesn’t mean polygamy is worse for women than, say, monogamy.

Across human history, the world has remained mostly a patriarchal place. Both in polygamous and monogamous societies, sons typically carry the bloodline and inherit the family property. Daughters marry into their husband’s family and name. Still, there are important differences. In polygamous societies the male-to-female ratio is tilted in women’s favor. So women have a chance of mating above their station. In monogamous cultures, lower-quality women are reduced to mating with lower-quality men. As the American anthropologist Laura Betzig once said, “Which woman would not rather be John Kennedy’s third wife than Bozo the Clown’s first?”