The Problem with Polygyny

Men who have lots of babies with lots of different women seem to be having a moment right now. Between Elon Musk’s outspoken pronatalism and Andrew Tate’s penchant for sexual aggression, it’s easy to see how somebody might think that we may be about to enter a new social phase: the death of monogamy. And indeed, it’s trivially easy to find discussions of emergent polygyny in the more manospheric corners of Reddit and in incel Discord servers, which describe “Chads” with numerous sexual partners as just one manifestation of this dynamic.

This all raises an interesting question for a demographer like me: is polygyny the future? Will we see, as we did during the expansion of steppe ancestries in the Bronze Age, a dramatic increase in the inequality of male reproductive success, with a few men having dozens of children by many women, while twenty, thirty, or perhaps even fifty percent of men have no descendants at all?

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