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When a significant proportion of the the ruling elite have had been married more often than the number of their children, then that society is deep into decadence.
Thus an average marriage/ children ratio of above 1 in a group is evidence of exceptionally deep psychological pathology of the self-loathing-suicidal type.
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Note: Of course the above does not apply to each individual person, since individuals have different callings and serve different societal functions; but it does apply to cohesive groups such as The Ruling Class, or religious denominations/ atheists, or nations.
Focusing on the ruling class misses the point. Charles Murray has shown that (in the US) the marriage/child ratio is much more likely to be high for the underclass than for the elite.
ReplyDeleteA significant number of people on the alternative right seem to want to ignore this point - we do so at our peril.
It's worth pointing out that we have
ReplyDeletede facto a (serial)polygamous culture,perhaps the most polygamous in human history,that is highly skewed towards high status males.
@Foseti - The point is not differentials between high and lower class - but that high class (wealthy, educated, intelligent, conscientious) choose fertility on average significantly below 2 - especially the women.
ReplyDelete(So do the underclass, on average. The exceptions to sub-replacment fertility are the devout traditionally religious of whatever class.)
Of course there is now a mix-up between marriage and long-ish term partners.
But the phenomenon I was interested by is the severally married high status man with fewer children than wives, or none. By choice.
There is a special interest about the behaviour of the highest status people, the elite leadership: they set the parameters for everyone else, and are where decadence shows-up with the least confounding.
@JP - this *may* be so, although I am not convinced that we really know this, and either way the correlation is so weak as to be pretty worthless at the individual level.
For example, when you meet a high status man, do you think it reasonable to assume that he is highly promiscuous? Or vice versa? I don't think so.
Partly it depends on how status is defined - some definitions of status are circular with respect to sex.