Joseph Henrich

And that creates this pool of low status unmarried men.

Now you can decide what you want to do with that, but you need to understand the kind of underlying social dynamics that you're going to unleash if you legalize or decriminalize polygyny.

Right.

That's right.

And it actually benefited the church because it released people's responsibilities to their families and allowed them to migrate in and join the church and more heavily invest in the church.

And these later prohibitions against priests marrying and stuff was all an effort to get greater investment in the church because you weren't torn between, you know, helping your son and then investing in the church.

Yeah, I mean, in the record, I've never been able to find much evidence that they were thinking about the destruction of kinship ties.

There is a great quote from St.

Augustine where he talks about the benefits of forcing people to marry more distantly.

But, you know, this is something that was debated repeatedly in church councils all across Europe.

Yeah.

And, yeah, it doesn't seem to pop up very often.

I think so, although it's hard to know.

There was a lot of randomness going on in the diffusion of the church.

But also, as the church arrived, these places—

over a period of time became more successful.

So you can see rising urbanization in the wake of the church's arrival.

That would have meant more trade.

Their citizens' rights began developing because they were trying to attract citizens to the towns.

That would have given the church more cachet, ability to move.