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.
Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.
In terms of family structure, I know my opinion isn't the most popular these days but I'd actually rather see society grow more supportive of earlier (pre-industrial) family models. Where children, extended family (aunts/uncles/counsins), etc stayed together more as a unit. They don't necessarily all need to be under the same roof, but in close enough proximity that they can easily socialize with each other, lean on each other in times of need, share caregiving burdens, etc. I think it's healthy for children to have meaningful amounts of time with other role models besides just mom and dad, and the presence of cousins also enriches their development. Unfortunately with contemporary economic and educational life this is difficult to replicate, and social mores make it all but impossible.
At least in urban UMC culture in the US, there's a strong emphasis on investing highly in your child's development and enrichment. After school activities, extracurriculars, tutors, "good schools" (whether tuition for a private or expensive housing in a "good" school district) etc. For the game they know, the UMC status game leading to professional security, these investments make rational sense even if there are real downsides to this lifestyle. Increasingly, the only way many ordinary urban professional types can afford this degree of investment in their children is to have only one kid. You'll notice that at the real top end large families become more common again (see how many hedge fund guys have 4 or more kids, it's a thing). Lots of people in my generation in the rural town I grew up in have 2-3 children, a few have more. Most of the people with more these days are either 1) very religious, 2) wealthy, or 3) both. For average working and middle class wage earners in the US times are tight and it's hard to support multiple children while keeping your head above water financially and actually save for the future.
I do not practice family law except when volunteering but I know enough about it to say that these robo prenups are likely not enforceable in most states in situations in which it would matter at all. The statement of law about premarital assets in the article itself is also garbled.
The big hurdle that both “partners” need to get over is that both sides need independent counsel to advise them about the implications of the prenup at the time it was made. This is not waivable. Further it cannot reach issues of parental rights and responsibilities to children. It is through those mechanisms that you can take bank shots at the other side’s assets, premarital or otherwise, prenup or no.
This service is targeted to people who don’t need prenups (people who can’t afford lawyers) to provide a security blanket that provides no security. The professor interviewee who talks about the equitable powers of judges gets into some of the issues but that will go over the heads of 99.9999% of readers including the author.
People want to believe that they can outwit the system with magic words. They do not like the feeling of being an insect who can be cut into pieces at the whims of a powerful and unaccountable robed bureaucrat. They want to believe that they have “rights” et cetera, and our system takes some pains to promote those beliefs until it is dinner time, with the citizen on the menu. Ho ho ho citizen, you have the right to be well sauced when your time comes.