A recurrent criticism cropping up in the discussion on Egan’s New York Times article is that polygamy inevitably creates “Lost Boys.” These are young men that get kicked out of a polygamous community to reduce competition for a resource in short supply –that of marriage partners. One commenter put it this way:

A simple polygamous example involves 6 people:
one man has 3 wives
two men have none

In this model, one man’s gain is another man’s loss. I would like to explore, through some preliminary statistical analysis, why this isn’t an adequate model for 19th century Mormonism, but it may be relevant to contemporary FLDS. I say “may” because I do not have enough data about the FLDS to make a judgment. I can, however, address whether the criticisms lobbied at them apply to 19th century Mormonism.

I can identify a number of modern sensibilities and assumptions underlying the above scenario.

1. A husband and wife marry close to the same age. On average, a husband is 2.3 years older than his wife.
2. If you form an age demographic pyramid by stacking blocks each with a length proportional to the population in each age range, then the US pyramid currently looks more like a column (see Table A-1).
3. Assuming that 1. and 2. persist for some time, it follows that the marriage pool has the same number of men as women, therefore one man’s gain is another’s loss.

We could find a solution to this dilemma using modern statistical numbers. Here is an example that models the current US marriage market that involves 100 men and 100 women selected at random between ages 40 through 44. In that sample you can expect to find 18 men and 13 women that have never married. Now suppose you had a time machine and the ability to arrange consensual plural marriages. You could arrange 7 two-wife arrangements and 3 three-wife arrangements before creating more “lost boys” than the 18 created without your interference. While this example is somewhat contrived, it illustrates a couple of points. First more men choose not to ever marry than do women in their age group. Second, the modern marriage market operates at nowhere near 100% efficiency for marrying off all its females.

The commenter cited above concludes her simple example with “I don’t want to live in a society where 2/3 of the men are unmarried and not invested in community life.” This is ironic because she already lives in a society that is 2/3 of the way there already with 44% of males aged 20-45 being menaces to society.

Of course 19th century Mormonism operated and the FLDS operates at much closer to that 100% efficiency. According to Kathryn Daynes in More Wives than One (p. 93-94), 99% of Manti Mormon women born mid 19th century eventually married while only 89 to 93% of their US peers did. Missionary work brought in a steady supply of converts and emigrants. Daynes showed that spikes in new marriages closely followed incoming waves of newly arriving emigrants. That is one advantage 19th century Mormons had over the FLDS who do not actively proselyte. The 19th century practice seemed to regulate itself after a rough, overzealous start during the Mormon Reformation in 1857. The percentage of polygamists declined with time to meet long term sustainable levels.

There were two other 19th century monogamous strategies (besides increasing efficiency) that were available to alleviate the zero-sum, simplistic example above. The first was to increase the age difference between husbands and wives from 2 to 5 years on average. That doesn’t help by itself; but if each mother raises an average of, say, 8 children (typical for 19th century) instead of less than 2 like they do now days, then the age demographic pyramid will truly be a pyramid instead of a column (or worse considering the baby boom retirees coming up). Let us see how this worked in Utah for marriage market broken down by age from the 1880 census from Ancestry.com.

Some valuable information can be extracted from this table. For one, it helps bust the myth that polygamy was needed to compensate for Utah having a higher women population than men. Men had higher life expectancies than women, especially on the frontier, and especially considering that many women died in child birth before the advent of modern medicine. Clearly men are not being invited to leave Utah to ease tension in the marriage market, outside of serving temporary missions, of course. The table also helps visualize what happens to unmarried pool for men who married on average 5 years younger than themselves. The most active age ranges for marrying off is the 15-19 range for women who had first pick of men moving into the age where they could comfortably support a wife between.the 20-24 age range for men.

According to L. L. Bean and G. P. Mineau in The Polygyny-Fertility Hypothesis: a Re-evaluation, the polygamists of the birth cohort (1840-1859) most relevant to the 1880 census married a second wife that was, on average.one year younger than a monogamist Mormon’s first wife. This suggest that single men had an advantage in the marriage market over their already married peers. Furthermore, the widening age difference between a polygamist male and his subsequent wives moved reality even further away from the zero-sum example above.

Now I am sure that some of those numbers add fuel to the fire of critics who decry the youth of some of these brides. I have also compared the 1880 census results for Utah and the rest of the nation. The national percentage for married 13-14 year old females was 3-4 times higher than it was for Utah. For age 15 the trend reversed as the nation’s 1.3% compared to Utah’s 2.0% For age 16, Utah was within 50% of the national rate and at age 17 Utah was still less than double the nation. Before anyone makes a big deal of this, the nation’s 1850 teenage marriage rates are higher (at least preliminarily) than Utah’s 1880 rates. Like Seth said (paraphrase), we will apologize for our ancestor’s polygamy when the critics apologize for their ancestor’s monogamy.

So where did the 19th century lost boys go? Perhaps they went to Neverland, as my research has failed to find any evidence of them. For males aged 20-35 leaving Mormonism would have made their prospects for marriage substantially worse.