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Comment by Kluny | Hacker News Reader

> In India, there is the opposite effect: Because brides are scarce, families are under less pressure to save for expensive dowries.

So weird. Note that it says "less" pressure, not no pressure. Women are in short supply, yet their culture still requires the bride's family to pay the groom to take her? More evidence that those macroeconomic supply and demand curves are nonsense.

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> More evidence that those macroeconomic supply and demand curves are nonsense

You'll throw out reams of evidence because it doesn't match a marriage "market" in a developing country undergoing a cultural shift?

That's an interesting observation, because the equivalent of dowry has mostly disappeared in China due to the gender imbalance. And in some cases even the reverse (groom's family paying a dowry, in cash or real-estate) is demanded.

I believe the groom demanded to be paying for car and house is actually majority of the cases in China these days, especially in cities. Women have decent income themselves, most parents only have a single child, so why should mine (girl) be worth less than yours (boy) while there are plenty of men to be chosen from with a short supply of women

You logic fails to understand that part of supply/demand theories is that external forces (like cultural influence) can have a major influence.

This might just be what it is like to be in the middle of a curve that will eventually reach 0.

Perhaps in a few decades the dowry will be flipped or gone altogether, but it takes a while to change culture - even when you have macroeconomics on your side :)

Supply and demand curves are microeconomic, not macroeconomic. Also, they predict continuous changes to equilibrium (what we're seeing here) and not sudden jumps to zero (what, I agree, isn't happening.)

Bribes help women get better husbands. Unlike USA marriages in India is about family ties and hence it is important that an uneducated unattractive women gets a good husband. She has to pay the premium of dowry to get a husband who otherwise will not marry her.

An educated engineer girl in India can easily marry a waiter without dowry but her inherent greed for wealth makes her seek someone who is even richer and she pays for that using dowry.

Dowry system is essentially greed of females and not males.

I’ve not experienced social dating outside of the southwest of the US, but if you don’t think social, familial, educational, and income factors don’t heavily weigh into marriages, here, then you’re 100% wrong, and need to meet both my mother-in-law, and mother. Also, be aware that past a certain age, women here can pretty much expect full-time interest by their “aunties” in arranging dates to meet potential suitors.

I am pretty sure you are in top 5% people by education, income and thinking. But people like you and me don't really count when we are talking Indian statistics. It is that farmer in Bihar who counts more.

As income levels in India rise this will rapidly go away. But then we are at least 30 years away from that.

P.S. These are not really big problems as the op-ed intellectual yet idiots make them out to be.

The concept of arranged marriage and bribes aka dowry is not a girl's fault, it's the society's / cultural stupidity, the greed of parents to earn money off their son and take revenge for the dowry they pay for their daughters How could you reach such a tangent cause for an effect?

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