Theodore C. Bergstrom, University of California at Santa Barbara

Abstract

Gary Becker devotes a chapter of his Treatise on the Family to "Polygamy and Monogamy in marriage markets. The inclusion of polygamy in his analysis is more than an intriguing curiosum. Although overt polygamy is rare in our own society, it is a very common mode of family organization around the world. Of 1170 societies recorded in Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas, polygyny (some men having more than one wife) is prevalent in 850. (Hartung, 1982). Moreover, our own society is far from completely monogamous. About 1/4 of all children born in the United States in 1990 were born to unmarried mothers who were not cohabiting with the fathers. Even though simultaneous marriages to multiple partners are not offcially recognized, divorce and remarriage leads to a common pattern of "serial polygamy", in which males remarry more frequently than females and are more likely than females to have children by more than one spouse.