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Comment by chrisan | Hacker News Reader

"In China, where girls have been systematically culled from the population, there were 34 million extra men in 2010, according to census data. In India, there are 17 million more men and boys between the ages of 10 and 24. That makes the marriage market even more competitive, which puts a man without a good job at a major disadvantage. Many are bound to be bachelors for life — a potent formula for violence, some scholars say, especially against women."

I know, or rather have heard the stories about baby girls in China, but I had no idea just how real and much of an impact this had. That is nuts.

The US 2010 census was pretty close to 50/50 http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf

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Historically the world has dealt with a surplus of men by having wars.

I don't think that's the way it worked. War resulted in a deficit of men, but it's not that kingdoms/nations went to war to reduce the number of men because it was thought there were too many men.

The way it works is we take young men hopped up on testosterone and convince them that joining the military is a good idea for REASONS. Then we go to war due to "scarcity" of resources, which is the flip side of the coin of what people mean when they say "we have too many people."

So, you can rearrange the semantics all you like, but he's essentially correct.

People, kingdoms and nations went to war for many reasons, from oppression, to "marriages" among royals, land grabs, consolidation of power in order to have more political stability (fewer incursions from usurpers of the kingdom), affronts, insanity, etc. but I can't imagine many were due to "we have too many restless men" we need to concoct war, risk losing war and our people, because we have too many young men and we need culling because....

A standing army plus reserves and the population you could call up to fight is what kept enemies from wanting to invade.

If you actually study the history, the single most common reason that people go to war is due to a lack of resources of some sort. Food or something critical to the economy or whatever. (Edit: There are a MILLION explanations, but scarcity of resources or insufficient resources of some sort is almost always the actual root cause.)

So, again: "There aren't enough resources" is essentially what people mean when they say "There are too many people." Sending people to war -- win, lose or draw -- tends to get the number of people down and may have long term impact on keeping the number down by removing the potential for those who died young on the field of battle to reproduce at all.

You can claim all you like that "BUT, THAT isn't THE REASON we go to war" and, you know, it just makes me think you have no understanding of history. It doesn't convince me you are right.

If by men you mean people, ok. But he said too many "men". But its still backwards, its like when someone says, oh my food is too cold and you say, no, it's not too cold at all, it's simply not hot enough.

Often times wars were fought for stability. If you were stronger the weaker adversaries would be less likely to wage war against you. So your going to war was more to counteract someone else's lack of resources who might fight for them rather than your need for resources...

Anyhow it like saying we went to war because we wanted to live longer.... Ok. Yes, but that's not how we typically present the issue.

So your going to war was more to counteract someone else's lack of resources who might fight for them rather than your need for resources...

This is causing me a blue screen of death moment. You are disagreeing with me by saying "But the war could start because of someone else's lack of resources..." and I cannot fathom how that is an argument against the idea that a lack of resources is almost always the root cause.

So, I think I shall step away from this discussion now.

Thank you.

One is cause the other effect.

If countries really started wars to reduce their populations, they'd send women to war instead of men.

That isn't what the GP said at all.

> Historically the world has dealt with a surplus of men by having wars.

> we go to war due to "scarcity" of resources, which is the flip side of the coin of what people mean when they say "we have too many people."

Broadly speaking, you are right. "I want your land" can be interpreted as meaning "I don't have enough land" and need Lebensraum.

The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire could be interpreted as Spain not having enough gold, land, and people.

The US invasions of Panama and Grenada could be interpreted as due to a lack of pro-Americans in power in nearby countries.

The Norse fights with the Dorset and Thule "skraelings" could be interpreted as due to a lack of desired cultural homogeneity.

But it's hard to make sense of anything at that level of generality. To push it a notch higher, I could say that wars are due to specific arrangements of atoms. I would be absolutely correct, but it wouldn't be helpful.

That was true up to about 1900 or so. But most wars since then have been an economic lose for the side that started them.

I remember reading about this very thing in Barbara Tuchman's "A distant Mirror". In medieval France there was a large number of bandits that looted the countryside and wreaked havoc wherever they went. The royalty would find some excuse to wage war and hire a general to round up the bandits and bring them away with promises of war bounty. In the scope of world history, though, this was probably not too common.

This isn't quite correct; it should go

> Then we go to war in order to make sure some other country can't create artificial scarcity of resources, which would reduce the number of people we have against our wishes

It is about preventing someone else from cutting off your supply lines.

They don't do it deliberately, but that's how it often happens. Even in tribal societies those with a surfeit of young men tend to start raiding neighboring tribes for women.

Yeah, no chief or despot or king or prime minister ever took a nation or tribe to war with the explicit goal of reducing the number of young men in the population. However, when you have a bunch of extra young men looking for something to do, as opposed to a shortage of same (i.e. not enough of them to do the things that need doing), the opportunity cost of going to war also goes down. So nations with a surplus of young men are more likely to go to war.

Yes, there are many factors. But too many men can increase aggressive restlessness.

I am not sure about in which way it worked, but in some Plato writings (thousands of years ago), there were clear scenarios on population control. So perhaps kings have been advised to send the youth to war for this purpose.

Reading a lot of middle east ancient history, it's pretty easy to see the population pressure causing regular wars. In my opinion, Gilgamesh has a much milder tone than a lot of ancient history because it was nearer to the time when agriculture and walled cities were a new invention and the population pressures were much less severe.

Maybe excess of immature and foolish yields too many opportunities for violent events to happen ?

There's no historic surplus of men. It's entirely created by selective abortions.

Can you expand on this?

See http://www.economist.com/node/15606229

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_women_of_China :

"Son preference is traditional in Chinese Confucian patriarchal culture" ... "China implemented its one-child policy from 1979 onwards" ... "Given strict family-size limitations and a preference for sons, girls have become unwanted in China because they are considered as depriving the parents of the possibility of having a son" ... "About 37–45% of China's missing females may have been missing at birth [due to Sex-selective abortion]", and other factors include infanticide, poor nutrition leading to poor health conditions, and under-registration.

No, historically a surplus of men was created by running a polygamous hierarchical society where the richest x men get 100% of the women and the remaining men are now surplus (although some amount of them can be absorbed as low status labor in risky occupations)

Historically, even true monogamy (that is, monogamy not only on paper) would concentrate women on the upper end of the wealth/power scale, due to death by childbirth. Most men would either have a sequence of wives, or none at all.

Sufficiently well-organized places to not have robbery bands internally or raiding parties externally would, in absence of wars, often be big exporters of mercenaries.

Medical abortions are expensive, and home abortions are dangerous. It's much safer to carry the female infant to term, and kill her after birth, or abandon/neglect her and let nature take its course. Female infanticide has a long history in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_China

The problem has been exacerbated in recent years because of limitations on how many children couples could have, but a lack of financial resources could also place pressures on people to have fewer children, and make as many boys as possible. But this is certainly not "just" a modern problem created by modern abortion technology.

Funny you mention this because China did use an extreme version of this technique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_wave_attack

Funny you linked to this Wikipedia entry because the relevant sections correctly calls human wave a misnomer in the context of Korean War.

Infantry assaults with men marching shoulder to shoulder has not happened since the Russo Japanese war - even Somme and the Japanese Banzai charges are significantly less dense than how they tend to be portrayed in the media.

Historically, surpluses of young, unmarriageable men has not been a good situation in China. It's a recurring trend around most of the large-scale peasant rebellions. A man without access to women, with no prospects of a family of their own, has little to lose and everything to gain from violence. ISIS is a pretty standard example of how that tends to play out.

> The US 2010 census was pretty close to 50/50

Well, China is as well (according to information above). 34 million is 2.5% of 1.34 billion (Chinese population in 2010), so China is at 47.5/52.5.

That's not that close. I have heard the imbalance is causing real problems. I mean, that is a 5 point difference and ...geez ...(breaks out calculator cuz I'm old) about a 9% difference. And probably worse in certain age groups. If 10% to 20% of men have no hope of getting married purely based on a lack of women, not counting women making other choices or being gay or whatever, that's going to have significant social consequences.

That's pretty far from 50-50, man. It means one out of every ten men won't have a partner if you naively paired them up.

If that 34 million figure is correct, it would be 2.5%, not 10% ("one out of every ten").

sure, but you'd have to look at the age / demographics too wouldn't you?

it might be 2.5% of the total population but women live longer on average than men so what happens if you look between the ages of say 20 to 30?

The "one out of every ten" figure is basically correct given the division stated in tomp's comment.

Assume the population is 47.5% female / 52.5% male.

Then, for every 525 men, there are 475 women.

This means out of every 525 men, (525-475) = 50 of them can't mate, which is 9.5%.

However, tomp is wrong that 2.5% of the population being surplus men implies that the population share is 47.5-52.5 (this split means 5% of the population are surplus men, not 2.5%). It actually implies 48.75-51.25, which means about 4.9% of men have no female counterpart in the population.

And this is intuitively correct; if 2.5% of the whole population can't find a partner, and all of those people are men, and the numbers of men and women are approximately equal, it should be the case that about 5% of men can't find a partner.

I come up with 4.9%. 1.35 billion in China, and assuming 34 million more men than women, that gives 692 million men and 658 million women. 34 million of those 692 million men do not have a corresponding woman. 34/692 = 0.04913294797688.

Oh, you're right, I divided by the entire population instead of the the male population only.

Maybe they should let gay relationships on TV...

People don't usually marry for wildly different ages, so what about age brackets?

34m of the total population is 2.5%, but what is 34m as a percentage of the population between, say, 15yrs and 30yrs?

Stepping out to a clearer source, Wikipedia[1] summarizes data from the World Bank and the CIA. I think the numbers that best reflect current China suggest a 12% (CIA at birth), 17% (CIA 15 or younger) or 19% (WB at birth) disparity depending on the estimate. Choose any of those and you've got a pretty huge disparity. I think that the article may have been looking only at a cohort, not the entire population, so taking the ratio of the quoted number of missing men against the entire Chinese population may be misleading.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio

By way of comparison, NYC is 53/47 in favor of females, and it is famously difficult for women to find men in NYC. That ratio is way more off-balance than you might think.

From what I understand some families were/are allowed to have two children if the first was a girl.

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