Pearl - How the Invention of the Plow Created Monogamy w⧸ @thisisshah

00:00:00.080 But what happens is, is the plow comes in and when the plow comes in, one person can plow a field

00:00:07.680 that's way more than humans can do with the digging stick or with the hoe. So you end up 1.00

00:00:13.040 with a lot more essentially wealth because you're able to till a lot more land, plant a lot more

00:00:17.920 food. So when the plow comes in, women start to become housebound because they're not needed to 1.00

00:00:23.840 work on the field anymore so they and the men started doing it all because it was a harder job

00:00:29.920 to do and it was just creating a lot more wealth that you started seeing income stratification

00:00:35.520 so polygynous societies you know bride wealth paying societies tend to be very uniform there

00:00:40.640 isn't this very rich guy and this very poor guy they're all about the same okay yeah and then

00:00:46.720 there's more polygamy when there's less yeah come disparity that's what you're saying yeah

00:00:51.280 Polygyny. Polygyny meaning that a man marries multiple. The thing is, you might have a guy 0.89

00:00:57.680 with more than one wife, but he had to pay that same uniform price, so it circulates around. It

00:01:03.840 brings him back into a match with everybody else's wealth by doing that. When the plow comes on,

00:01:11.760 you start to see income stratification. When a woman's working on the field, she's bringing in 1.00

00:01:17.920 real income to the house. We're not talking about labor at home. We're not talking about making

00:01:22.600 sourdough bread. We're talking about actual agricultural income. So stuff that needs to be

00:01:27.600 produced, basically. When the men start doing that and the women are more homebound, you end up with

00:01:32.940 this huge income stratification. There's rich, there's middle class, there's poor. And then what

00:01:40.060 you start to see is it goes from bride wealth. So now the man is not paying her family anymore.

00:01:46.760 polygyny starts to go away divorce becomes rare and then it starts to become monogamous

00:01:51.640 because now private property is a lot more important paternity of the child's going to

00:01:56.040 be a lot more important too because now you're thinking about inheritance is a lot more how this

00:02:01.240 passes down.

Pearl - June 03, 2025