What if I give you 10 rugs to make government corruption problem go away ? <| sep |> m anmanywivesbigproblemHere is something else to consider As far as I ' ve been able to determine , no polygamous society has ever been a true liberal democracy , in anything like the modern sense . As societies move away from hierarchy and toward equal opportunity , they leave polygamy behind . They monogamize as they modernize . That may be a coincidence , but it seems more likely to be a logical outgrowth of the arithmetic of polygamy . Other things being equal and , to a good first approximation , they are , when one man marries two women , some other man marries no woman . When one man marries three women , two other men don ' t marry . When one man marries four women , three other men don ' t marry . Monogamy gives everyone a shot at marriage . Polygyny , by contrast , is a zerosum game that skews the marriage market so that some men marry at the expense of others . For the individuals affected , losing the opportunity to marry is a grave , even devastating , deprivation . Just ask a gay American . But the effects are still worse at the social level . Sexual imbalance in the marriage market has no good social consequences and many grim ones . Two political scientists , Valerie M . Hudson and Andrea M . den Boer , ponder those consequences in their 2004 book Bare Branches Security Implications of Asia ' s Surplus Male Population . Summarizing their findings in a Washington Post article , they write Scarcity of women leads to a situation in which men with advantages money , skills , education will marry , but men without such advantages poor , unskilled , illiterate will not . A permanent subclass of bare branches unmarriageable men from the lowest socioeconomic classes is created . In China and India , for example , by the year 2020 bare branches will make up 12 to 15 percent of the young adult male population . The problem in China and India is sexselective abortion and sometimes infanticide , not polygamy where the marriage market is concerned , however , the two are functional equivalents . In their book , Hudson and den Boer note that bare branches are more likely than other males to turn to vice and violence . To get ahead , they may turn to appropriation of resources , using force if necessary . Such men are ripe for recruitment by gangs , and in groups they exhibit even more exaggerated risky and violent behavior . The result is a significant increase in societal , and possibly intersocietal , violence . Crime rates , according to the authors , tend to be higher in polygynous societies . Worse , highsexratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonization or war . In medieval Portugal , the regime would send bare branches on foreign adventures of conquest and colonization . An equivalent today may be jihad . In 19 thcentury China , where as many as 25 percent of men were unable to marry , these young men became natural recruits for bandit gangs and local militia , which nearly toppled the government . In what is now Taiwan , unattached males fomented regular revolts and became entrepreneurs of violence . Hudson and den Boer suggest that societies become inherently unstable when sex ratios reach something like 120 males to 100 females in other words , when onesixth of men are surplus goods on the marriage market . The United States as a whole would reach that ratio if , for example , 5 percent of men took two wives , 3 percent took three wives , and 2 percent took four wives numbers that are quite imaginable , if polygamy were legal for a while . In particular communities inner cities , for example polygamy could take a toll much more quickly . Even a handful of Solomons highstatus men taking multiple wives could create brigades of new recruits for street gangs and drug lords , the last thing those communities need . Such problems are not merely theoretical . In northern Arizona , a polygamous Mormon sect has managed its surplus males by dumping them on the street literally .