For a country like Canada, in which wealth is very unequally distributed, economic theory predicts that wealthy men should have more of everything, including wives. This doesn’t suggest that wives are property. It suggests that if income matters then women who are maximizing their welfare, and the welfare of their children, should prefer to be the second, third, fourth wife of a very wealthy man to being the only wife of a poor man.
Furthermore, aside from the financial resources, she may prefer the lifestyle in terms of the amount of time she will be expected to spend with her husband, the close friendship of the other wives, childcare, and so forth.
In the economic sense a policy is not optimal if someone can be made better off without making others worse off. If this is the criterion, then it has to be that criminalization of polygamy not be an optimal policy. If we allow everyone to act in their own best interests when making marriage choices, and assume that parents act in the best interest of their children, then surely those who chose to live in a polygamous household are better off than they would be in a monogamous household. They have to be because that is the arrangement they have chosen.
You can’t make someone better off by forcing them to choose an alternative form of marriage that they do not prefer.
Thank you, Marina Adshade. Let people decide for themselves. Let everyone who wants to get married marry the consenting person(s) he are she wants to marry. How does it hurt anyone else?
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