Gendercide: The worldwide war on baby girls
economist.com
economist.com
In The Moral Animal, Robert Wright discusses this in addressing the social benefits of egalitarian, pro-monogamy social values. As a kind of real world experiment illustrating the meliorating effect of marriage, consider this:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/all-you-...
In the 1970s, the PLO reigned in the radical militant young men in Black September by marrying them off.
Apart from the obvious horror of infanticide, this is what I find most unnerving about the widening gender skew in these countries.
Quite clever I thought.
I can't even begin to imagine what a mindfuck that must be.
This would be an interesting case to discuss with proponents of cultural relativism (pretty much everyone in academic circles), along with bride burning in India and female circumcision in Africa: I see absolutely no way you can defend it.
Anyway, at one point in the book, he meets a family in the countryside where the mother had died and the father was working off in another city, leaving one last elderly grandparent in the care of a 10 year old girl. Genji took her, raised her, and she became a member of his household. About 10 years later, after Genji's wife died, he actually married her.
Anyway, it'd be totally politically untenable to loosen the adoption restrictions, and going as far as to allow adoptive parents to compensate the family would never happen. It'd be just politically impossible due to perceptions involved, and maybe that's a good thing. Still, infanticide is no good, and I wonder if there's other solutions if we could broaden our perspective.
The United State government is racking up extraordinary debt, backed with little saving. If it keep doing that, we may entered not just stagnation but collapse.
There is also the agriculture crisis in Africa as a certain fungus ravages crops all over. It has already spread to Iran, I heard.
The 21st century certainly hang in the balance as we flirt with danger.
And Greece isn't bankrupt. You can't reasonably say that a country is bankrupt until it starts defaulting on its loans.
Why would government spending help the economy at all? Let give people shovels to dig holes and fill it back it in! Surely, breaking windows will make jobs for the glassmakers.
Let not forget that all the fancy infrastructure projects that the government is making has to be maintained. We may like all the new roads that we're paying for right now, but too many roads mean higher maintenance bills, which mean higher taxes and less money for consumers to spend it on or save.
Maybe it is better to let all the irresponsible firms bankrupt themselves and let people who made the correct bet win all the money. Let the Nassim Nicholas Taleb of world win big.
The free market runs on firm failure, not just firm success.
You only downmod for spam and stupid comments. If they are wrong they go to 0. If you disagree then reply, but you don't downmod just because you disagree.
That is still under discussion.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057347
(The linked comment is not the most current comment on the issue, I'm pretty sure, but one that came up readily by searching.) An older comment by pg
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
appears now to be superseded in part. I will follow the group culture here where pg (the site founder) and the moderators take it.
The time for making the correct choices has long passed. Now there are only bad choices and worse choices. If we hadn't done (1) and (3), then running deficits right now would be a good option. After a certain point, increases in debt begin to dampen growth in GDP, which means that the gov't won't be able to stimulus away the problem anymore.
In that light, the current administration is merely doing what makes sense. Spend whatever amount of stimulus makes sense during their tenure because the economy will need it whether it's now or later. Not spending it will mean that whoever is the challenger in 2012 may well win, and whoever the challenger is will probably dish out stimulus money in some form or another anyway.
I used to rage at all the ignorance on display even among the more thoughtful/non-violent libertarian types. But I've lately become apathetic. The same arguments have been going around and around since the time of Cato the Younger. The more history I study the more I believe that humans are not going to save themselves by virtue of critical thinking about social engineering. It's basically technology or bust. And that is a dangerous game. Sorry for the melodrama. It's late.
I've basically given up on politics. I self-identify as a left-libertarian, but I think most left-libertarians are deeply misguided, just like most right-libertarians. Most right-libertarians can't even see that they have a great deal of shared beliefs with left-libertarians. Anarchism is just my favorite political utopia; not a pragmatic ideology. Some hybrid of left and right libertarianism would be much better in practice than either extreme. Political discourse needs a healthy dose of meta-discussion.
An example reason why I've given up on politics: We know exactly what is happening with global warming, the IPCC report from 2007 is basically correct. Global warming is happening, and thousands and thousands of animal species are going to go extinct, and hundreds of millions of people are going to have more trouble getting food and water. That's bad, and we should be doing a lot to stop it, but it's basically too late to stop. The current argument about global warming will just preserve the scenarios outlined by the IPCC in 2007.
So the left misses that global warming has absolutely no chance of bringing the end of human civilization. And the right misses that global warming is certainly happening and is still really bad, even though it isn't going to bring about the downfall of human civilization.
My private discussions since my Less Wrong post about the Craigslist Revolution have actually lead to some very interesting private discussions about saving humanity with social engineering, but you're right, it's basically technology or bust. I'm an optimist.
Not sure that we import many weapons, since we make so much at home.
We have lots of corn and pigs.
So what's the point?
I'm sure its possible to spend too much on roads but I don't think we've ever come even close. (I also think that while people are a bit more relaxed about owning that bit of "investment property" that they may one day build a house on and retire, it might be a fantastic time to greatly expand our railway lines.)
But if the government spends money hiring unemployed and underemployed people to do jobs, even so crude a job as dig holes and refill them (though of course that's not particularly efficient, as it doesn't build capital), it can either take that money out of the system at a later date (i.e. deficit spending) or inflate it away via seigniorage. The point being that the shift in spending is temporal. And that's precisely what you want in a recession.
this sort of jobs program is just welfare with the caveat that you have to be somewhere 40 hours a week. this helps workers save face. but the result is the same: value is being taken from one group and being used to prop up another. whether society as a whole benefits from such a safety net is a whole nother argument and I won't argue about the rightness or wrongness of such a plan here. but trying to transmorgrify the issue to obscure the means and ends is awful.
Loans (deficits) shift expenditure from one time to another. Welfare and welfare-like policies funded by deficits (loans), in this branch's context of counter-cyclical policies, don't "take value from one group" and use it to "prop up another". They reduce consumption from the future, where hopefully we're richer, and increase consumption today, via loans.
in the other case, where investment is made in a wealth producing venture, why is government needed? the only reason money isn't available for sound investment will be due to malinvestment brought about by shitty incentives in the first place.
also, WRT transferring future wealth to the present:http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/09/maturit...
If you don't agree with this kind of macroeconomic reaction then that's the argument you should be making. To disagree with these loans because they can't possibly turn a profit just misses the point.
To an outsider, the problem seems that the current establishment, posing as laissez-faire, has made an art of "privatizing the benefit, socializing the loss". With a bank, no one is risking the chaos of millions of people stripped out of their savings, roaming and ransacking. The prevention measures differ.
For example, Sweden nationalized a bank which nearly bankrupted, thus punishing the stakeholders by removing their profits. The USA just pays them more money. The message is clear: let's resume the financial bonfire, because risk pays.
At the end of the day who are more "libertarian", the socialists or the neo-liberals?
However, it is to be argued that distributing money randomly in public works isn't exactly the best way to handle it. The previously unemployed are not the most likely to build businesses to find sustained employment, to create wealth for the economy. Random public works are not so likely to create wealth for the public. There's the possibility to do much better; unfortunately the simplified Keynesian analysis doesn't capture this.
One example of a terrific project is microfinance. These loans give people a chance to create actual sustainable businesses. The loans are repaid at a rate of nearly 97.7%. What this shows is several things. The first is that the capital of microfinance can keep on giving. At this repayment rate, the capital can be given out 30 times before it's at half of the initial amount. There's thus a huge multiplier effect there. Furthermore, the repayment comes from the proceeds of the operation. Hence, in 97.7% of the cases, the businesses that are funded will keep on going -- another huge multiplier effect. On a giving basis, there aren't enough dollars in the world to solve poverty: with a system like this, there might be.
You're a proponent of Keynesian economics then. How do you counter the argument that no government spending is ever only temporary? There's no such thing as a temporary countermeasure in politics. So spending now in all likelihood means spending forever. And that is surely not good at all. No politician ever will seriously reduce spending when all is well. Keynes is only cited when times are bad..
http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/obrienj/poetry/hanraha...
Europe and Japan declining in population? I find that hard to believe. Do you have figures to back that up?
Greece bankrupt? Even if it were true, any negative consequences of that will be mitigated by the EU. And a country in turmoil will only have a positive effect on birthrate.
Fortunately there was a lot less danger at the end of the 20th century when there were still nuclear weapons at the ready all over the globe.
I'm not the you responded to, but here goes:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Mark Steyn's book America Alone has much more on the implications, written in a rather witty style.
http://www.amazon.com/America-Alone-End-World-Know/dp/159698...
The only European country that is maintaining its population is France, and it only barely. In the Euro-Med countries the average number of births per female is about 1.3, far below the replacement rate of 2.1. In Japan (which has the oldest mean age in the world), pop is dropping so fast that they are permanently closing almost one primary school per day.
Greece bankrupt? Even if it were true, any negative consequences of that will be mitigated by the EU.
Technically not bankrupt yet, but Greece and most other European countries (and the US, at our current rate of debt growth) had better hope like hell for an AI breakthrough that pushes productivity rates thru the roof. Welfare states are pay-as-you-go plans, with the younger generation paying for retirement of the much smaller number of elderly. That only works as long as there are lots of young people and not many older folks. In other words, the cutbacks and riots in Greece and California these last few days are just the beginning w/o huge productivity breakthroughs. Let's hope that Ray Kurzweil is right.
And a country in turmoil will only have a positive effect on birthrate.
Evidence???
For Europe, it's less clear, as there's a lot of variation. But, data is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territori...
For example, Italy is in a bad spot. Debt is greater than GDP, and birth rate is lower than replacement rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Italy
China's current massive population is the consequence of Mao's belief that the Chinese could outbreed any nuclear war. The one-child policy is an attempt to get China back to a sustainable population size, which, for China's land and resources is about 1/2 the current size.
Notes: 1 - Women marry into other families, and so one would lose the support in old age, as the resources earned by the daughters would go to the family she married into.
It is by far the most Christian nation in Asia: 29% in the 2005 census and the largest (vs. 23% for Buddhism and 46.5% no religion). This is going to have very strong effects on social attitudes towards women and means what happened there in reversing this problem very probably won't elsewhere. Certainly not the PRC with its suppression of religion (of any non-Party dominated mass organization) and likely not in India with its well entrenched two major religions and their focus on each other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle
Too bad evolution is so slow.
Secondly, your reasoning is more generally completely irrelevant.
What you said was analogous to this:
Children can kill their mothers in childbirth, so obviously kids before reproductive age are still relevant!
Ok, so obviously non-reproductive individuals can affect the transmission of a person's genes. So can hurricanes, viruses, and cows. However, when you're solving your nice systems of differential equations to look at the evolutionary dynamics of various genes, you only consider reproductive individuals, because these are the only ones that transmit genes.
Yes, non-reproductives can have effects in evolutionary dynamics, but only as passive environmental elements. Dying because you have a gene that makes you susceptible to a virus is the same as dying in childbirth, to evolutionary processes. There's natural selection against the genes that made you weak to the virus, and natural selection on the genes that made your fetus too large.
I hope that makes sense. It can be hard to communicate with people from different fields; they use words differently than you do. (I'm a graduate student in evolutionary biology)
The grandmother hypothesis doesn't contradict what I said at all. If you wanted to model evolutionary processes, you only stick in the reproductives, because they're the ones that will be producing more copies of their genes in the next generation.
As for risking your life for a stranger, evolution doesn't always find the maximum; it often settles in local maxima. If a strategy works 51% of the time, it will persist.
And yes, there are more forces at work than biological decent, but I don't see how that's relevant to anything I said. It's so imprecise it can't help but be true. So much for physicists.
In a society with such a gender imbalance, women can be more picky and some men are left without hope of getting a partner. Without a partner, what are they going to focus on life, if not work? And who is gonna get their money when they die?
Communists may be evil, but they aren't stupid, so it's unlikely they haven't foreseen this.
EDIT: Did the math and concluded that for a normal sex ratio of ~103 to turn into one of 120, you'd have you be losing 14 of every 100 females through either prenatal abortion or unreported killing at birth.
All in all I'd have to say this helps explain why the PRC is ramping up their police state (e.g. see http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870424050457458...)
I'm in Cambodia right now. Communists are, in fact, quite stupid in addition to being evil. However, that doesn't really pertain to the infanticide thing, which is more a characteristic of very poor areas than communism.
I guess I'm just happy whenever I can actually access an article there. I thought they put up a pay wall a few months back.
In response to your later justification, though, most western societies have been patriarchal, so the fact that we've been very successful at fighting and killing each other is not an indication that women somehow would not if given the chance.
Your argument breaks down to this: since men are so bad at keeping the peace, women must therefore be better at it.
But that's just it. The entire time men have been behaving badly women haven't even shown the slightest interest in participating so that's already evidence enough for me to make some conclusions about which is the more docile and empathetic gender.
While we're broadly generalizing, does the fact that men have accounted for 95%+ of all inventions, scientific breakthroughs, philosophy, and governance in history mean men are more proactive and hard working to go alongside women being more docile and empathetic? And does this lend itself easily to a judgment that a particular gender is better?
Not to mention, many Native American cultures were matriarchal, and had absolutely no compunction about slaughtering each other there, either.
I find it somewhat ironic that your justification for saying that women are better than men is that they are more docile and empathetic - the very same reasons that were trotted about to try and deny women the vote (i.e., too docile and easily led by the nose politically, too emotional to vote rationally, etc). It's hard to consider you pro-female when you seem to riding the same train of thought as anti-female folk.
I do mean this in the most sincere, respectful way possible: have you considered taking a course in anthropology at your local university? I studied anthropology in a limited way during my time college, it was very eye-opening, and IMHO your viewpoint wouldn't stand up to a simple gut check against even introductory undergrad-level anthro. I know this may sound like I'm bashing you, but I'm really not trying to - IMHO you seem like you have a lot of misconceptions about culture and history which can be rectified by formal education on this subject.
I didn't use docile in a negative way. I meant they are less likely to use aggression as a means of resolving conflict. There is nothing anti-female in my stance.
Thanks for the anthropology tip but now you are contradicting yourself. Most of formal education is simply a reflection of the attitudes and mores of the current times especially when it comes to classes like anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc. Most people that are technically trained, math, physics, cs, etc. are quite blind to this aspect of education. What do you think they taught in anthropology, sociology, psychology classes when women had very few rights, that women were the best ever? No, those classes reflected the attitudes of men learning and teaching in higher education and the same is true now, except now depending on who teaches the classes you might get an anti-male view or a "balanced" one.
Also, men and women face different challenges in wife. For example I suppose in many primitive societies, if one tribe raided another, the enemy men were killed, but the enemy women were taken home and being married (just one example).
If (I have no idea whether it's the case or not) biological determinism was true and those views were confirmed, I still wouldn't see women as inferior. Being smart enough to create and have low enough morals to use the atomic bomb is NOT a gift, it's a curse.
In answer to your actual question, though, you proffer a world with no war in violence as an ideal. However, I challenge that idea that you would even enjoy living in such a world; or at least enjoy living in such a world that is necessitated by a total lack of violence.
In elementary school, we learned that the central element to every story is conflict. A story with no conflict is boring. The same is true of life.
And then add to that that it's impossible to have a world without conflict without giving everyone a lobotomy, which would then result in the sudden collapse of civilization and the extinction of the human race...
It's a very simplistic world view you have that all violence is wrong. Sometimes violence is necessary, and sometimes it's entertaining (sports or action movies, anyone? Or a good beheading in the old days?). But even if you disagree on those two points, conflict is inherent in any system where individuals of the same species compete for resources.
There are such things as dumb questions, especially if they're hypothetical.
As a sidenote, I know Buddhism is quite popular in the West these days, but after spending time in Asia, I don't see it as superior in practice to the Western religions. The best of Buddhism, the most interesting and enlightening concepts make it to the West. But they have just as much silly superstition, social control, religious rank and hierarchy, and warriorship/violence in their history as the Western religions. Actually, some of the finest fighters of their era are the Shaolin and Honganji monks of China and Japan, who were at times much equivalently brutal to crusdaders and jihadists.
As for me personally, I think struggle is a good thing. I think all the most important and valuable aspects of life are struggle - living, thriving, growing. Childbirth, one of the heights of human experience, is a brutal struggle. Farming is struggle, hunting is struggle, cooking is struggle. Training to dance or sing or play an instrument is struggle. I'm with you on non-materialism as accumulating stuff isn't particularly effective, but I (personally) reject the notion that struggle is bad. All the best parts of life are a struggle or the fruits of struggle. I embrace struggle, I embrace suffering for worthy causes - suffering in exercise, in farming, in hunting, in cooking, in dancing, in having and rearing children. It's all struggle - I don't want nirvana, give me this world and its struggles and sufferings, and I'll embrace it fully.
> There is something wrong with you if you think that life needs to perpetuate violence for thrill's sake.
This I agree with, but I think the original commentor's point was a bit more nuanced than that. I think he was saying conflict is necessary at times for life, and he was also noting that people do enjoy observing conflict and drama playing out. Myself, I've got mixed feelings on this - you know, I much prefer baseball to American football for instance. I played linebacker in high school, but watching a 6'6 220 pound receiver catch a pass in the air and get destroyed by a 6'4 260 pound safety while he's largely helpless makes me cringe a little. The strategy aspect of American football I quite like, the brutality of it not so much. So I'm with you on some points, less so on others.
Some people think that innate differences are extremely minor, while others attribute major cognitive and behavior traits to gender.
Perspective 1 is appealing to people women admire the amazing things men have done, such as develop a vaccination against polio or smallpox, or splitting the atom, and want to see more participation from women. Perspective 2 is appealing to women who are appalled with the negative things men have done, such as spreading the plague to invade a city or dropping an atomic bomb on a city, and want to believe that women would never do such a thing.
So the uncomfortable compromise is that men and women are the same, except for the countless ways in which women are better.
Of course, I don't know how much is innate and how much is cultural, but I'm almost certain that the whole "if it's bad, it's innate to men, if it's good, it's just because women have lacked opportunities" is total crap.
It is probably difficult to understand the historical effect of women being cut out of the academy, and otherwise ignored, unless you read some accounts of it. Simone de'Beauvoir's "memoirs of a beautiful daughter" and "the second sex" may explain much to you.
What makes you think I don't value science and technology. Just because I don't approve of the man doing the work does not mean his work does not have merit.