You might consider that formal polygamy is directly linked to (a) religious authoritarianism, (b) gender inequality, (c) reduced education for women, (d) lowered economic productivity, (e) low standard of living.

When all those things travel together, it's not clear that polygamy should be viewed as the primary cause.

That's a good challenge, thanks. I suppose we'd have to do a historical analysis of societies to try and tease out the relative effects of each of those factors independently.

It’s not clear to me how the first three would lead to social instability though. There have been plenty of religiously authoritarian cultures that were quite stable. Similarly gender inequality and reduced education for women have been common historically and it’s hard to see how they would lead to social instability and violence. After all it’s not very common for women to rise up violently against gender based oppression, that just doesn't seem to be the dynamic.

I can certainly see how low productivity and standards of living could lead to violence. Desperate people can reach for desperate means. Nevertheless there are many very poor countries round the world and only some of them are significantly polygamous. The fact that the most unstable 20 are all to some degree polygamous seems to me to be a pretty strong correlation. If polygamy can be a driver of social instability though, it’s fairly straightforward to draw a logical causal link from that instability to all sorts of other social and economic ills.

It's hard to draw conclusions on that subject as many prosperous polygamous cultures in the past have been destroyed or assimilated simply because Christianity and other monogamist cultures were technologically superior and/or simply more aggressive. IMHO far too many variables were in play through ages to just pull a simple connection like that today.

The Economist article I linked to provides pretty convincing examples of direct causal links, and personal testimony from those affected and why and how it affected them.

As for conquest and Imperialism, Islam has strong polygamous tendencies and has been very aggressively expansionist in it's history. It even has formal rules spelled out in the Koran for acquiring women through conquest (their non-Muslim marriages are automatically rendered invalid on capture).

Funnily enough Muslim countries rank high on instability metrics, and we can see from recent history how stable and developed Muslim countries under autocratic rule collapse into chaos once that autocracy fails.

If even just the top 10% of men only have one extra wife, or 'girl friend' in a flat and secretarial role, as is common for middle eastern businessmen and politicians, that means the bottom 10% of men cannot ever marry. People will go to great lengths to get out of that bottom 10%.

I wonder to what extent the recent shift in sexual access for young men is a factor in political radicalisation in America. There seem to be a lot of angry young white kids around these days.

A, B, and C have existed in most societies below a certain threshold of per capita wealth, regardless of whether or not polygamy was practiced, so you may as well throw those out. And essentially every single highly developed country with an economy that is not primarily dependent on resource extraction has a long cultural history of enforced monogamy. Correlation != causation and all that, but I sure as hell wouldn't bet on polygamy being a societal arrangement conducive to human flourishing.

Actually it makes sense when I think about it - one of biggest frustrations of young male life is not able to have a (sexual) partner. Hollywood makes fun of this in teen movies, but reality is much darker. If society is geared into perpetual state like this, the poor/unattractive folks become properly desperate and act accordingly.

Just look what long celibate does to priests. Soldiers in war have to be 'neutralized' via some mild suppressants in the rations (at least WW II was done like this from what I had read).

Anaphrodisiacs in soldiers' food is an urban myth, according to https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-saltpeter-principle/

Soldiers are typically supplied prostitutes, and one of the main spoils of war is the opportunity to rape the enemy women.

Also, if you survive the war and come home, being a war hero is very attractive to the ladies. You can speculate about an evolutionary background to that.

And even if they don't rape, they usually marry a lot in the conquered/liberated/whatever country they are victors in(just lookup war brides).

You are right.