The Joy of Economics:  Making Sense out of Life
 Robert J. Stonebraker, Winthrop University
 

Monogamy: A Cure for a Modern Arms Race

            Marriage, if one will face the truth, is evil, but a necessary evil.

                                                                                                .....Menander

            We were good friends: Donnie, Steve and I.  We were nine years old and were lined up waiting to board the school bus to Fountaindale Elementary School.  And we had a problem: a bus seat could accommodate only two children.  The first two of us would sit together; the third would have to sit apart.  Even worse, given the children who would enter at the next stop, the empty seat beside the solo member of our trio was likely to be filled by a girl -- an unimaginable humiliation for a nine-year-old boy.

            We begged the bus driver that we be allowed to cram together in a single seat, but to no avail.  He hid behind "district rules."  What could I do?  The only way out was to avoid being that third member; to get to the bus stop early.  After all, only the last of our three risked a close encounter with the opposite sex.  So, I went early.  I sped through my cinnamon toast -- eggs were far too slow -- and hustled out the door a full ten minutes before usual.  My reward?  I was first in line and got to sit with either Donnie or Steve every day. 

            But Donnie and Steve were no dopes.  Within a week they caught on to my strategy and began arriving early themselves.  So I arrived even earlier.  Within three weeks each was running out of the house a full 30 minutes before the bus was due.  Our early morning sprints to the bus stop were costing us both sleep and breakfast, but none of us could afford to end our mini-version of an arms race by ourselves.  We were trapped.  What could we do?

            Luckily, our mothers did it for us.  Recognizing the no-win battle for what it was, they joined together and imposed a cartel solution.  By parental decree, enforced by threat of household violence, we left our homes at the same time and rotated the dreaded number-three spot in line.  Thank God for mothers. 

Investment:  good and bad

            Donnie, Steve, and I invested much time and energy into our mini-arms race.  It all was wasted. Normally, investment is touted as the key ingredient of economic growth; it creates the new products and new technology that drive increases in our standard of living.  But not all investment is equally valuable.  Not all investment creates socially valuable output.

            Rational individuals will invest time and effort into an endeavor only if they expect a profitable rate of return.  Unfortunately, what looks like a profitable investment to the individual may not be equally profitable to society as a whole.  For example, my efforts in arriving early at the bus stop were "profitable" to me.  The expected benefits outweighed their expected costs to me.  However, my efforts created offsetting costs for Donnie and Steve.  My gain was offset by their loss.  Our mutual investments in an early arrival were costly, but they created no new products or benefit for the group.

            Defense investments provide a more consequential example.  As weaponry has progressed from broadswords to bows, from muskets to missiles, nations have spent fortunes on developing new and improved instruments of war.  To what avail?  Individually, potential combatants have little choice.  If my enemy might invest in weapons research, I must be willing to match her efforts.  Unilateral decisions to limit such investment are perilous.  Yet the social value of such rivalrous expenditures is questionable.  Are battles fought with smart bombs more humane than those fought with rocks and clubs?  What is in the interest of individual participants may have limited, or even negative, payoffs to society as a whole.

            Do you want more examples?  World-class athletes wage similar arms races.  Knowing that only a fraction of a second or a few centimeters separate winners and losers, competitors continually try to one-up their rivals.  An extra hour or an extra day of training might make the difference.  The result is an all-consuming training regimen that few of us could imagine.  And for what?  The individual rewards for victory can be very substantial, but the social return is dubious.  Despite the grueling regimens, despite the pain endured by winners and losers alike, the pleasure a spectator gains from watching a mile run in 3:46 is little different from that watching a mile run in 3:56. 

            How about student recruitment efforts by colleges and universities?  High-school students are inundated by unsolicited and often unwelcome brochures, viewbooks, letters, and phone calls.  Admission officers scurry around the country to high schools and college fairs, lugging suitcases crammed with promotional literature, banners, and videos.  No single institution can afford to leave the field to its competitors.  Yet, in the end, the billions of dollars spent in this academic arms race have precious little impact on the numbers of students pursuing higher education or the types of institutions they attend. 

            Economists Bob Frank and Philip Cook term these cases positional arms races.¹ The investments of time and money are geared to improve the relative position of the participant in the market or contest and have little impact on the quality of the final goods and services produced.  Much of the investment, from society's perspective, is wasted.

            Frank and Cook also contend that wasteful positional arms races are most common in winner-take-all markets.  These are markets in which success depends upon relative rather than absolute performance, and in which the payoffs accrue primarily to a handful of top participants. For example, the Olympic men's sprint champion who wins by the slimmest of margins will capture all of the glory.  No one remembers the runner-up or offers him television endorsement deals.  Even though he collected the most popular votes, Samuel Tilden lost the U.S. presidency by a single electoral tally.  Did you ever hear of him?  Americans only barely eked out a victory in the Revolutionary War, but that narrow edge changed the course of history.

Curbing positional arms races

            Participants in positional arms races understand that every investment they make to gain a relative edge might merely induce offsetting investments by their competitors.  They understand this can be wasteful and mutually draining.  Yet no one can afford to stop by him or herself.

            Collusion might be a way out of the box.  Perhaps participants could mutually agree to limit investments.  For example, countries could enter voluntary arms agreements to limit the numbers and types of nuclear weapons produced and stored.  Unfortunately, such agreements are not always legal.² And such agreements are difficult to enforce.  Even when I pledge to limit arms, I still have an incentive to develop and stockpile weapons secretly.  People cheat.³ 

            A better remedy is to have investment limits imposed by an outside agency with the power to monitor the agreement and discipline violators.  In the school bus illustration, mothers effectively enforced the agreement.  But other agencies can be equally effective.  Are you worried that junior high students will overspend trying to impress their classmates with the latest fashion attire?  Have school officials impose a dress code.   Do you want to ensure that colleges do not overspend trying to recruit football players?  Have the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) limit the numbers of scholarships and recruiting visits coaches have in their arsenals.  Do political advertisements drive you up a wall?  Petition Congress to tighten campaign spending laws.

Monogamy

            Positional arms races also are evident in the contest for love and marriage.  Who among us has not invested time, energy, and money trying to outbid a rival in pursuit of a mate?  The process is expensive and emotionally wrenching.  But it could be much worse.

            Consider most mammalian species.  Reproduction is far more costly to females than to males.  Females bear the burden of both long pregnancies and the initial care and feeding of the young.  Once conception has occurred, from a biological perspective, males are home free.  As Frank and Cook note:

            This asymmetry means that any single male is capable, in principle, of siring an almost unlimited number of offspring.  And since, in the Darwinian scheme of evolution by natural selection, each individual's goal is to transmit as many copies of its genes as possible to the next generation, the result for males is a genetic tournament with enormously high stakes.⁴ 

            In other parts of the animal kingdom, dominant males often service entire herds of females and zealously protect their turf from potential rivals.  Lesser males are shut out of the reproductive loop altogether.  As should be expected, the competition to be top dog in such markets can be savage, even to the death.

            Humans are not immune to such battles but, historically, have attempted to limit them whenever possible.  In polygamous societies dominant males do commandeer harems of the most desirable females, but the battles for domination are limited by social convention.  Typically it is only those males with high social or political rank, often chosen by birth, who can aspire to multiple wives.  A former student from a rural Liberian village regaled our class with stories of his great uncle, a chief with almost 100 wives.  More recently, a controversial Utah religious sect that separated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, teaches that men without at least three wives cannot reach heaven.  Sect leader Warren Jeffs has been accused of arranging polygamist unions with girls as young as 13 and, to eliminate excess males, apparently has expelled hundreds of teen-aged boys and young men from the community.⁵

            The alternative approach, adopted by most Western civilizations, is legally enforced monogamy.  When the dominant male is allowed only a single bride, many beguiling mates remain available for others.  Of course, competition still occurs.  Contests for the best mates can get ugly.  And the casualties of romantic combat litter the newspapers with "in search of" classifieds.  Has monogamy completely eliminated positional arms races in love and marriage?  No.  Has it reduced socially wasteful competition to more acceptable levels?  Absolutely.

            Interestingly, the difference in reproductive costs also can explain why males tend to be more competitive than females.  Because the cost to males is low, they tend to seek multiple partners and compete with rival males for the opportunity to do so.  In an evolutionary sense, those most successful at such competition were the genetic winners. On the other hand, because reproduction is very costly to females, they tend to limit their number of sexual partners.  As a result, females often tend to be less competitive, but more choosy in the sexual market place.⁶

Faster economic growth?

            In addition to creating more reproductive opportunities for many men, monogamy might fatten their wallets as well.  Polygyny can be expensive.⁷ Allowing people to consume multiple bags of potato chips should push up both the demand and equilibrium price for chips.  Allowing multiple wives should create the same result.  The demand for wives should rise, and the equilibrium bridal price should rise right along with it.⁸ 

            In Sub-Sahara Africa where polygyny remains common, these prices often take the form of explicit payments from the prospective husbands to the fathers of their future brides. Unfortunately, if the well-to-do men spend their fortunes buying multiple wives, they have little left to invest in the capital goods that might increase their countries' productive capabilities. (Do you want to review those shifting PPC's discussed in the What to Produce chapter?) They end up with lots of wives who can produce lots of children, but very little of the machines and technology needed to produce other goods and services.  Not surprisingly, those countries that practice polygyny also tend to have very low rates of economic growth and very low levels of per capita income. Ouch.

            Wait.  There's more.  Remember that the beneficiaries of the high bridal prices often are fathers rather than the brides themselves.  Fathers who themselves paid high prices for their wives will want to recoup their costs.  The easiest way to do that is to have lots of daughters who, in turn, can profitably be sold.  The result?  Polygynous countries typically are saddled with explosive rates of population growth as well.

            Monogamy sounds better all the time.

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Notes:

1.         Frank, Robert H. and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society, The Free Press, 1995. The reasoning that follows and many of the examples were originally developed by Frank and Cook.

2.         Agreements to limit wasteful spending might be useful, but many other types of agreements among potential competitors are not.  For example, agreements to jointly fix prices or to divide markets are clearly anticompetitive and violate the Sherman Antitrust Act.

3.         Institutions and countries also cheat.  Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) sign elaborate agreements limiting oil production enough to keep prices above competitive levels.  But, in their attempts to gain relative advantage, OPEC members routinely cheat and exceed their agreed-upon production quotas.

4.         Frank and Cook, op. cit., p. 183.

5.         The expelled youth are known as "the lost boys."  See http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1505997,00.html.

6.         Gneezy, Uri and Aldo Rustichini, “Gender and Competition at a Young Age,” American Economic Review, May 2004, pp. 377-381. Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund cite additional experimental evidence that women are less competitive in "Do Women Shy Away from Competition," NBER Working Paper #11474, 2006.

7.         The terms can be confusing. Polygamy refers to a world of multiple spouses. It can occur either through allowing men to have multiple wives (polygyny) or the less common case of women having multiple husbands (polyandry).

8.        See Schoellman, Todd and Michele Tertilt, "Marriage Laws and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa," American Economic Review, volume 96, number 2, May 2006, pp. 295-298.  This section is based on their analysis.

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Testing Yourself

To test your understanding of the major concepts in this reading, try answering the following:

1.         Describe positional arms races and explain how they might lead to wasteful spending and competition.

2.         Explain why it is difficult to control wasteful spending in positional arms races.

3.         Explain how monogamy might benefit men.

4.         Use the concepts of differential costs to explain why men might have evolved to be more competitive than women.   

5.         Explain how and why polygyny is likely to affect a country's rates of economic growth and population growth.

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