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More cows, more wives

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Re: More cows, more wives

#41

Post by xg15 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #39
xg15 wrote: post #36

> For around 280,000 years, roughly 95 percent of our history as Homo sapiens, we lived as hunter-gatherers. OT, but I find this fact mindboggling whenever I read it. Our way of timekeeping and general education emphasizes the last 2 millennia. Popular (highschool level) history usually goes back maybe 5-8. The furthest is maybe the end of the ice age ~14 millennia ago. But then you learn there are still 270 millenni…

And the total human population in prehistory was tiny, likely under a million for much of that time, and possibly dropping to a few thousand at some point. The total human experience of those 250k years may not be much more than the last few thousand...

Good point, and in a way even more crazy.

Re: More cows, more wives

#42

Post by MagicMoonlight »

blfr wrote: post #24

most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans Yeah, but, as it turns out with modern migration trends, the revealed preference is that they would want to, given an opportunity. Being European, I would also prefer to live like a European. Lifelong monogamy as a default and an almost universal ban on kin marriage seem to be solid contributors here. Also, I don't think the current remnants of hunter…

These societies are the failed people we left behind.

They’re like the PHP developers of humankind. They limp on, but everyone else moved on a long time ago. If they were successful, they wouldn’t still be doing it.

Re: More cows, more wives

#43

Post by CalRobert »

kakacik wrote: post #33
CalRobert wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question, of course, is whether that means women want divorce more, or men fear divorce more.

Women absolutely want the divorce more once they come to conclusion some aspect of relationship is over (typically the emotion part but simply spending less time together or feeling most of the burden of raising kids is enough). Most guys can suck up now-loveless marriage trivially if kids are fine (after kids come, this is pretty standard path for marriages), heck we can still enjoy sex greatly in such situation. Mo…

They’re often sexless though.

Also it’s often fear of stepdads. My mom dumped my dad so she could date a string of abusive assholes. It would give me pause before leaving a marriage that wasn’t utter misery.

Re: More cows, more wives

#44

Post by CalRobert »

bombcar wrote: post #26
voakbasda wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not surprise me, as the courts are flagrantly biased toward women in these matters. Almost without exception, they come out ahead in every measurable metric.

This is not always exactly true if you dig into the details - for example, something like 20% of fathers get custody - but it's something like 90% of fathers who try to get custody get some.

“Some”?

Anything less than fifty percent is state sponsored kidnapping.

Re: More cows, more wives

#45

Post by Spooky23 »

geremiiah wrote: post #8

Enjoyable read. I've long since been wondering whether the low birth rates have something to do with the insecurity that surrounds modern day marriages. If you're a woman you don't want to invest in children, only to be divorced and left to raise the child of your now No.1 enemy. If you're a man, the insecurity is around whether the child is yours and also whether your wife will later divorce you and your child be ta…

It’s all economic, pride and ego. Once you hit a certain amount of income, the marginal cost of children seems too much. It’s not a big deal when you have nothing.

Maintaining a middle/upper middle class lifestyle for your kids is expensive. Few people can afford daycare, 5x college tuitions, etc. Extended families tend to be spread out and social networks aren’t what they once were.

Dudes online blather about paternity, divorce, etc. all nonsense and all irrelevant. Bad marriages and divorce are not new, although religious and conservative people try to imply that. The entire movement for prohibition in the early 20th century was driven by absent fathers who would drink their wages away and let the children starve in some hovel.

The only thing that’s “new” is women have the ability to choose birth control.

Re: More cows, more wives

#46

Post by M95D »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #6

> So how does one explain the parts of the world, like Europe and large parts of Asia, that are unequal yet predominantly monogamous? Note that when we talk about polygamy in the past, it's about, like in TFA, a man with many wives. Not a woman with many men. How does the modern "free" and "liberated" world reconcile that with feminism? When we talk about modern-day polygamous societies, it's basically islam. And isl…

You should clarify the use of "polygamy" term in this context. Having multiple spuses, implicitly having sex and children with them? Having children with multiple partners but no official mariage? Having sex with multiple partners but no children?

Re: More cows, more wives

#47

Post by EnPissant »

blfr wrote: post #24

most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans Yeah, but, as it turns out with modern migration trends, the revealed preference is that they would want to, given an opportunity. Being European, I would also prefer to live like a European. Lifelong monogamy as a default and an almost universal ban on kin marriage seem to be solid contributors here. Also, I don't think the current remnants of hunter…

>> most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans

> Yeah, but, as it turns out with modern migration trends, the revealed preference is that they would want to, given an opportunity. Being European, I would also prefer to live like a European.

The revealed preference is that they want to continue to live the same way, but to do it in European countries as they are nicer places to live.

The problem is that they are nicer places to live because "living like a European" is what produces these nicer places to live.

Re: More cows, more wives

#48

Post by DeathArrow »

This approach is correlational and interpretive. The same raw data points can be assembled into substantively different, even diametrically opposed, narratives depending on which mechanisms, confounders, or weighting someone wants to emphasise.

Correlation is not causation. Just because they appear together doesn't mean the cows caused the marriage system. It could be that a third factor, like high male mortality in war prone herding societies, caused both.

She ignores polyandry (one woman, multiple husbands) which occurs in some herding societies like Tibet. If "livestock = polygyny" was a hard scientific law, Tibet shouldn't exist as an exception.

Re: More cows, more wives

#49

Post by DeathArrow »

geremiiah wrote: post #8

Enjoyable read. I've long since been wondering whether the low birth rates have something to do with the insecurity that surrounds modern day marriages. If you're a woman you don't want to invest in children, only to be divorced and left to raise the child of your now No.1 enemy. If you're a man, the insecurity is around whether the child is yours and also whether your wife will later divorce you and your child be ta…

My view - for which I have no proofs, it's just intuition - is that people are too egotistic and self centered and too hedonistic to want to have children.

Re: More cows, more wives

#50

Post by DeathArrow »

> Monogamous systems, therefore, may have evolved to limit the transfer of resources, rather than as a form of monogamous mating.

Usually, polygamous societies tended to become monogamous or perish. Most of the young men who couldn't afford wives could be send to war and die there. Else, they could become very violent very fast because they had nothing to lose.

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