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WrongBot comments on Unknown knowns: Why did you choose to be monogamous? - Less Wrong
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I'd like to consider a related question: why did our society "choose" monogamy as a social norm? One major clue is the high correlation between monogamy and economic development--virtually all modern industrialized societies have adopted monogamy as a social norm, whereas most societies throughout history have practiced polygyny. But what direction does the causal relationship run? (*)
Does it make sense to start tearing down this norm before we get that question sorted out? Several commenters have said that they're not for or against polyamory, but they are for being aware of and considering the possibility of polyamory. But one way to enforce a social norm is to teach people to think in such a way that they do not even consider the possibility of violating it.
* See http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/webfac/bardhan/e271_f05/tertilt.pdf for one attempt to answer the question.
This is a good and important question. As the paper you linked to indicates, monogamous societies tend to have fewer children than polygynous ones; this, in turn, leads to a host of economic benefits.
But we should distinguish between polygyny and polyamory, which are not at all similar practices. The Trobriand people have a relationship-style that has much more in common with polyamory than polygyny, and this seems to be a direct result of their belief that sex does not cause pregnancy (which they possess because their diet greatly reduces the odds of conception).
While the Trobriand people are not economically well-developed, I think that their relationship-style is a result of that of lack of development and not the other way around. Consider: economic development would lead to a more varied diet, which would then restore conception rates to more normal levels and demonstrate a connection between sex and childbirth; prior to the advent of widely-available contraception, economically developed cultures and the varied diets that accompany them were incompatible with relationship styles similar to the Trobriand people's.
If this explanation is true (and I acknowledge that the evidence is certainly not conclusive), modern contraceptive techniques might make non-monogamous relationship styles viable in a way that they might not be otherwise. Contraception certainly has the potential to limit population growth, which seems to be polygyny's greatest economic downside. And we know from the Trobriand example that polyamory-type relationship styles are quite compatible with contraception.