Polygamy Without Children
Our new mating system, Millennials and prenups, and more in this week's digest.
I have a shorter digest this week due to travel.
There’s an interesting article by Josh Konstantinos on what he calls “Sterile Polygamy.”
You may not have noticed, but we’ve invented a new mating system. It has the sexual inequality of polygamy with fertility closer to a celibate religious order. The harem without the children. The monastery without the prayers.
No one announced this revolution. There was no manifesto, no movement, no moment when the old order ended and the new one began. The Pill arrived. Women entered the workforce. Divorce was destigmatized. Dating apps were launched. Each change seemed incremental and was framed as expanding freedom, which it did. But the cumulative effect was far from positive. We still use the old words — marriage, dating, relationship — the way Russians kept calling their country the Soviet Union for months after it had ceased to exist.
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If you’re older than 45, you likely live in a world where people still got married. The figures above may feel like dispatches from another planet. They’re not. They’re dispatches from the other half of your own country. Among women born in 1980, 71% of college graduates were married by 45. Among those without degrees, it was only 52%. Marriage has become a luxury good. And all groups are converging toward the same destination: below replacement fertility.
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Births happen within durable, socially enforced pair-bonds, not serial relationships with zero exit costs. Marriage and all that it entails — shared finances, legal ties, social expectations — makes the enormous investment of raising children viable. Serial dating has no lock-in. Either party can exit at any time. Without that commitment structure, neither side has an incentive to make the sacrifices that children require. When you can get sex without marriage, and marriage without urgency, you delay.
Consider the following. Of the 0.86 child decline in American fertility since 1970, delayed marriage may account for 47%. Never marrying may account for 29%. And married couples having fewer children? Just 24%. The collapse isn’t about family size preferences. It’s about families not forming in the first place. This finding isn’t unique to the US. Across many developed nations, the same pattern holds.
In Japan, the total fertility rate fell from 2.1 to 1.2 — but marital fertility has remained stable at approximately 2.1. South Korea tells the same story: marriage age rose six years in three decades, the never-married rate at 40 jumped from near-zero to 18%, and TFR collapsed to 0.72 — the lowest ever recorded. Germany, with a TFR of less than 1.4, matches the pattern too. Married couples still have children. The problem is that fewer people are getting married, and those who do are marrying late.
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Technology alone didn’t create this situation. It just removed the last constraint on a system that had been eroding for decades. Women’s economic independence removed the material need for marriage — a woman with a career doesn’t need a husband for survival. The collapse of institutional enforcement removed the cultural pressure. Church attendance fell, divorce was destigmatized, cohabitation became routine and premarital sex universal. Dating apps were the final blow: a technology that made the new equilibrium visible.
If you designed a system to maximize sexual access for high-status men while maintaining the pretense of monogamy, you couldn’t do better than the one we’ve built by accident.
Traditional polygamy at least maintained fertility. A chief with five wives sired twenty children. Solomon had 700 wives. The Ottoman sultans populated entire empires. Childbearing was the point.
We’ve invented something different: effective polygamy without children. High-status men cycle through partners, but nobody reproduces. Why? Because reproduction requires the lock-in that marriage provides. Serial dating offers men all the benefits of access with none of the costs of commitment. And women, waiting for commitment from men who have no incentive to provide it, delay childbearing until it’s too late.
Click over to read the whole thing.
Related: Why have birth rates cratered in majority Catholic countries?
Why Millennials Love Prenups
The New Yorker has an interesting article on why Millennials love prenups.
Today’s younger generations tend to favor easy exits. Earlier this year, the Times reported that Gen Z is skittish about opening bar tabs. “If we want to move somewhere else, it’s a lot harder to close out and then leave,” one reveller said. If divorce is the ultimate settling up, then it’s fortunate for this cohort that planning to part has never been simpler. The past few years have seen the rise of new apps such as HelloPrenup, Wenup, and Neptune that fast-track the process; the latter has couples discuss their finances with an A.I. chatbot before being matched, by algorithm, with a lawyer. In 2024, Libby Leffler, Sheryl Sandberg’s former chief of staff at Facebook (now Meta), publicly launched an online prenup company called First. There, users could at one point take a quiz with multiple-choice questions, including “When you think of the future, it looks like . . . ?” One possible answer: “Shared goals, different playlists.”
Best of the Web
NYT: Can you optimize love? (gift link) - A group of tech executives, app developers and Silicon Valley philosophers is seeking to streamline the messy matters of the heart.
WaPo: Heritage paper on families calls for ‘marriage bootcamp,’ more babies (gift link)
WSJ: Surrogacy Is a Multibillion-Dollar Business—but Surrogates Can Be Left With Big Debts (gift link) - Booming fertility industry, a new target of private-equity and other investors, is largely unregulated, leaving the women giving birth with few financial or legal protections
New Articles
New this week:
Overproduced Elites and the Luxury Welfare State (paid only) - How America’s professional-managerial class turned status anxiety into a political project—and why “normal” politics isn’t coming back. A guest post by Dr. Benjamin Mabry.
What’s Wrong with the Multiverse - Infinite worlds promise total freedom. But what if they’re quietly teaching us that nothing matters? A guest post by Joseph Holmes.
My podcast was with Lyman Stone on whether the United States will end up as the last man standing demographically.
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