Nicholas Eberstadt on a “Global War Against Baby Girls“: An ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination, … skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males, … sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls. … From a collision of three forces: first, local mores that uphold a truly merciless preference for sons; second, low or sub-replacement fertility trends, … and third, the availability of health services and technologies. … The total population of the regions beset by unnaturally high SRBs [= sex ratio at birth] amounted to 2.7 billion, or about 40 percent of the world’s total population.
It also occurred to me after I posted that parents might be motivated to select for one or the other gender because they think they'd be better at raising a girl or a boy, or because they already have one and wish to raise a brother or sister. Indeed, in a truly egalitarian society, that would seem (to me) almost by definition to be the only logical motivation. Which adds credence, me thinks, to the idea that it isn't the selection itself that's deleterious, but the underlying social mores that cause overall selection to be skewed radially toward one or the other gender, which in practice is gender inequality.
Consequently, I'm pretty skeptical that simply implementing policies that artificially balance the selection rate (say with quotas) would even make a dent in the underlying inequality that leads to the imbalance, as I suspect it would be treating the symptom rather than the disease.
Market forces are remarkable engines of transformation. But only a free market of ideas has hope of conferring equal agency as a person. A free market of gender selection will, at best, confer equal value in some gender-specific role (such as spouse). And in any society where free agency of self-determination (which is to say civil liberty/rights) is not gender independent, equal value as a spouse still won't mean equal rights as a person.
Basically, I think the two are a lot less interdependent than I take Robin Hanson's thesis to infer; but I concede I may be reading too much into his conclusions. Either way, I still think the only way a society achieves the stability of equal rights/liberties is to institute equal protections under the law, and the only way that happens is if the governed revere the principle of not treating others the way they would not themselves tolerate being treated,
Being more valuable as a spouse doesn’t necessarily lead to having equal rights.
Beautiful sentence. Indeed - sometimes being valuable is the worst thing to be. In highly stratified societies, purdah-type restrictions on females are generally only practiced by those in the top echelon, whose females are of the highest marriage value.
One side: "Girls sucks, let's abort them and have boy babies!"Other side: "Oh my god, that's awful, girl babies have moral worth!"
You see Robin as participating in the debate: "Hey guys, girls don't suck that bad, at least they're good for sex!" Obviously, that would be very messed up.
But he's not participating. He's commenting. He's pointing out that, in the long run, all other things equal, aborting female babies will cause the social and economic value of existing women to increase. If we believe that girls have moral worth, this is a good thing. So he is simply pointing out that if you attack gender-specific abortion rather than gender attitudes themselves, you will end up making women and girls worse off. A pretty standard case of unintended consequences.
Anyone who's spent 15 minutes on Robin's blog should recognize that he comments on debates far, far more often than he participates in them. Robin very rarely adopts the role, stated goals, values, and attitudes of a given "side"--rather, one main purpose of the blog is to point out cases where, for example, our stated goals, our means, and our values conflict with each other.
On a site called "Overcoming Bias," that's probably a good thing.
I sense a chicken and egg conflation. Parents select for boys either because they want their child to not grow up to be a second class citizen or because they support the social mores that make women second citizens. Either way, shifts in supply/demand of either gender won't alter the underlying mores. Being more valuable as a spouse doesn't necessarily lead to having equal rights. On the contrary. The city-state of ancient Sparta provided an object example of the extent to which a minority may go to control a majority of the populace.
Sex selection against girls in societies where boys are more highly valued means that fewer girls are in families that resent them. This seems like a utilitarian win-- and the parents are presumably happier since they have boy children. This also leads to the mothers getting better treatment.
I don't know how this should be balanced against the men who have lower chances of marrying, but it's definitely part of the situation.
One of the weird things about Eberstadt's article is that he really spendsquite a small fraction, perhaps 25%, of the article talking aboutwhy he thinks a changed sex ratio is a bad thing.The bulk of it is spent calling it "sex-selective feticide","biologically unnatural","shockingly distorted", "intentional female feticides","naturally impossible 108 or higher", "unnaturally high SRBs","suspiciously high SRBs"...
The rhetoric sounds ... disproportionate.Is this guy a neophobe in other contexts?When prospective parents were picking some other characteristicof their children, does this guy go equally overboard?
It's unnatural, the horror, the horror.Well, so are vaccines, spectacles, and crystals of elemental silicon.
The Chinese data is fascinating, but contradicts the American study I'm aware of (finding American men LESS willing to save and MORE willing to borrow as a response to a sausage fest). I suppose we'd expect populations to vary in response to gender imbalance.
The gender ratio one's offspring will face when it's time to get sold into marriage is a complicated coordination problem: parents try to predict the likely ratio, but also cooperatively create the ratio. So we have an information problem (rock paper scissors decision making), a problem of differing incentives (parents v. children and parents v. society), and all the usual biases that always apply, like wishful thinking.
If you conclude the market creates just the right number of females, I think you must also conclude that it creates just the right number of lawyers. (I am of course in favor of abortion in all cases, but gender ratio does seem important for quality of life, especially young men's quality of life. The prevalence of genital mutilation demonstrates that parents don't generally care about their children's future sexual well-being as much as one cares about one's own.)
Hm, the point was the following: RH talks about how abortion of females will lead to scarceness of females and then his conclusion is that this would lead to a heightened value of women.
If I am correct that Lake answered to my post, then our point is that Hanson only justified the economical value of women in relation to sexual desirability but completely ignored the rest without saying so and thereby making a very general statement which I don't think is true.
Aborting because the child is female signals the following: "Having a female child is not desirable."Supporting that notion leads, as far as I can tell, to the idea that women are not desirable and thus less valuable. Most people that don't want a female child don't want it because they think that women are less valuable.
This influences women's status as a whole - not only their role as spouses and as the sexual counterpart to men, but every part of their live. Their live is devalued.
The scarceness influences only the part, where sexuality comes into play. Maybe you agree with me, that this is not the whole life of a woman.
I am not saying, that a changing sex ratio is bad. I just think that you forget the whole part where women are more then just spouses and sexual objects.
The same people who excoriate others for preferring sons over daughters would express no distaste for the reverse.This explicitly includes informed feminists and masculists as they are part of the people you are talking about and they are even the most vocal about it. So it is rather normal and even expected to think your statement is about them.
Aborting females reveals a woman's value as a child. How exactly is that more about being "member of society" than is being a spouse? Parents typically weigh a child's value as a spouse heavily when figuring their value as a child.
It also occurred to me after I posted that parents might be motivated to select for one or the other gender because they think they'd be better at raising a girl or a boy, or because they already have one and wish to raise a brother or sister. Indeed, in a truly egalitarian society, that would seem (to me) almost by definition to be the only logical motivation. Which adds credence, me thinks, to the idea that it isn't the selection itself that's deleterious, but the underlying social mores that cause overall selection to be skewed radially toward one or the other gender, which in practice is gender inequality.
Consequently, I'm pretty skeptical that simply implementing policies that artificially balance the selection rate (say with quotas) would even make a dent in the underlying inequality that leads to the imbalance, as I suspect it would be treating the symptom rather than the disease.
Market forces are remarkable engines of transformation. But only a free market of ideas has hope of conferring equal agency as a person. A free market of gender selection will, at best, confer equal value in some gender-specific role (such as spouse). And in any society where free agency of self-determination (which is to say civil liberty/rights) is not gender independent, equal value as a spouse still won't mean equal rights as a person.
Basically, I think the two are a lot less interdependent than I take Robin Hanson's thesis to infer; but I concede I may be reading too much into his conclusions. Either way, I still think the only way a society achieves the stability of equal rights/liberties is to institute equal protections under the law, and the only way that happens is if the governed revere the principle of not treating others the way they would not themselves tolerate being treated,
Being more valuable as a spouse doesn’t necessarily lead to having equal rights.
Beautiful sentence. Indeed - sometimes being valuable is the worst thing to be. In highly stratified societies, purdah-type restrictions on females are generally only practiced by those in the top echelon, whose females are of the highest marriage value.
One side: "Girls sucks, let's abort them and have boy babies!"Other side: "Oh my god, that's awful, girl babies have moral worth!"
You see Robin as participating in the debate: "Hey guys, girls don't suck that bad, at least they're good for sex!" Obviously, that would be very messed up.
But he's not participating. He's commenting. He's pointing out that, in the long run, all other things equal, aborting female babies will cause the social and economic value of existing women to increase. If we believe that girls have moral worth, this is a good thing. So he is simply pointing out that if you attack gender-specific abortion rather than gender attitudes themselves, you will end up making women and girls worse off. A pretty standard case of unintended consequences.
Anyone who's spent 15 minutes on Robin's blog should recognize that he comments on debates far, far more often than he participates in them. Robin very rarely adopts the role, stated goals, values, and attitudes of a given "side"--rather, one main purpose of the blog is to point out cases where, for example, our stated goals, our means, and our values conflict with each other.
On a site called "Overcoming Bias," that's probably a good thing.
Lighten up. That's just the way economists talk. They can (and must to perform an economic analisys) apply cost benefit analysis to all human actions.
I sense a chicken and egg conflation. Parents select for boys either because they want their child to not grow up to be a second class citizen or because they support the social mores that make women second citizens. Either way, shifts in supply/demand of either gender won't alter the underlying mores. Being more valuable as a spouse doesn't necessarily lead to having equal rights. On the contrary. The city-state of ancient Sparta provided an object example of the extent to which a minority may go to control a majority of the populace.
Sex selection against girls in societies where boys are more highly valued means that fewer girls are in families that resent them. This seems like a utilitarian win-- and the parents are presumably happier since they have boy children. This also leads to the mothers getting better treatment.
I don't know how this should be balanced against the men who have lower chances of marrying, but it's definitely part of the situation.
If I am not mistaken not every utilitarian is also a supporter of capitalistic theory.
Supply and demand? Really? That's a watertight axiom to apply to mismatched populations? MFC, you utilitarians are monsters.
One of the weird things about Eberstadt's article is that he really spendsquite a small fraction, perhaps 25%, of the article talking aboutwhy he thinks a changed sex ratio is a bad thing.The bulk of it is spent calling it "sex-selective feticide","biologically unnatural","shockingly distorted", "intentional female feticides","naturally impossible 108 or higher", "unnaturally high SRBs","suspiciously high SRBs"...
The rhetoric sounds ... disproportionate.Is this guy a neophobe in other contexts?When prospective parents were picking some other characteristicof their children, does this guy go equally overboard?
It's unnatural, the horror, the horror.Well, so are vaccines, spectacles, and crystals of elemental silicon.
Sigh. I suppose that might well be on net unclear as well.
The Chinese data is fascinating, but contradicts the American study I'm aware of (finding American men LESS willing to save and MORE willing to borrow as a response to a sausage fest). I suppose we'd expect populations to vary in response to gender imbalance.
The gender ratio one's offspring will face when it's time to get sold into marriage is a complicated coordination problem: parents try to predict the likely ratio, but also cooperatively create the ratio. So we have an information problem (rock paper scissors decision making), a problem of differing incentives (parents v. children and parents v. society), and all the usual biases that always apply, like wishful thinking.
If you conclude the market creates just the right number of females, I think you must also conclude that it creates just the right number of lawyers. (I am of course in favor of abortion in all cases, but gender ratio does seem important for quality of life, especially young men's quality of life. The prevalence of genital mutilation demonstrates that parents don't generally care about their children's future sexual well-being as much as one cares about one's own.)
Hm, the point was the following: RH talks about how abortion of females will lead to scarceness of females and then his conclusion is that this would lead to a heightened value of women.
If I am correct that Lake answered to my post, then our point is that Hanson only justified the economical value of women in relation to sexual desirability but completely ignored the rest without saying so and thereby making a very general statement which I don't think is true.
So, where is the strawman again?
Aborting because the child is female signals the following: "Having a female child is not desirable."Supporting that notion leads, as far as I can tell, to the idea that women are not desirable and thus less valuable. Most people that don't want a female child don't want it because they think that women are less valuable.
This influences women's status as a whole - not only their role as spouses and as the sexual counterpart to men, but every part of their live. Their live is devalued.
The scarceness influences only the part, where sexuality comes into play. Maybe you agree with me, that this is not the whole life of a woman.
I am not saying, that a changing sex ratio is bad. I just think that you forget the whole part where women are more then just spouses and sexual objects.
You wrote:
The same people who excoriate others for preferring sons over daughters would express no distaste for the reverse.This explicitly includes informed feminists and masculists as they are part of the people you are talking about and they are even the most vocal about it. So it is rather normal and even expected to think your statement is about them.
Yes, the willful conflation of the two in strawman construction is pretty annoying.
Aborting females reveals a woman's value as a child. How exactly is that more about being "member of society" than is being a spouse? Parents typically weigh a child's value as a spouse heavily when figuring their value as a child.