Is the birth rate connected to the marriage rate?

What a huge question!

I think so many things would be different if there were twice as many females born that marriage differences would be minor by comparison.

But to answer the question I think women would pick men to be the fathers of their children, and that would be the bond that mattered rather than the legal bond we have now that was derived from ownership at it’s start. Initially it would have been the biological fathers and I think it would have evolved into something more flexible by now.

Not anymore. Today, besides the usual suspects, single middle class women are opting to simply have a child without a husband. We are headed for disaster, or are we already there?!

Well, we have some opportunities for observing natural experiments. There are several Asian countries where they are manipulating the birth rate in order to bias it towards males. When there are not enough women for these men to marry, will they allow women to marry more than one man?

As it happens, this does happen in places like Tibet and Bali. Often two brothers will marry the same woman, when there are not enough women. I don’t know if it will start happening in Han China, but we can watch and see. I also don’t know what happens in India and Pakistan and Afghanistan, but I’ll bet we do see similar things happening.

So perhaps there is something to your little hypothesis.

I’ll tell you what, though—let me live in a place where women outnumber men, please. I do not want to share a woman with a man, even if he is my brother. I want a harem all to myself.

@wundayatta you should try poly then.

I think we oh so smart people ( insert a snort ) would eventually adapt & constuct a social norm for which ever. Thinking back to the days of yore when it was socially acceptable for winter to marry spring no one batted an eye. In other words older men married younger women as wives often died in child birth. Get a younger wife to raise the step- children and produce more. In biblical times if your number one bride didn’t produce you had other options.That was just normal.Mankind like the rest of nature is normally bound to passing on its genes in whatever way is the most successful.
@wundayatta is right on about watching what goes on in China. Talk about a biology and social experiment unfolding before our eyes. For a moment I thought that having more than one husband would be great, then sanity came back and I realized how much more crap I’d have to do to maintain them all and keep the whining down to a dull roar…..... I think I would take a page from the black widow spider’s handbook of how to reproduce and get rid of the husband.

There is an article in this month “Discover” magazine about sex and the sexes. The main graph they have shows how the feminist movement of the sixties and seventies followed a period of time where female birthrates were greater than males and the conservativism of the ninetys followed a time when the male birthrate was greater than the females. It goes on to predict a return to a more moderate political period because the birthrates have once again reached an equilibrium. I would like to see a more in-depth article on this but, if we took it to an extreme, it does seem to go along with the way you are thinking.

@wundayatta, is correct about China’s One Child Per Family. It has had two unexpected consequences. The first is the lack of women for the men to marry, forcing them to “import” women, often those with little to keep them in their own country. The second is the large numbers of “little emperors.”. Boys who are so prized that they get an over inflated idea of their importance. I am not Chinese, so I have not encountered these men in my own life, but I have read that this is a problem. If anyone has personal experience, please let me know if I missunderstood. Like I said, the only experience I have is what I’ve read.