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The one child policy was not created by this cadre of leadership. The male/female imbalance also happens in India, which does not have such a policy.

While India does in fact have a similar imbalance, I invite you to look at the problem in the context of this image:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sex_ratio_below_15_per_cou...

Also: (order the chart descending by either at birth or <15)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio

The numbers are actually much stronger than I thought they would be.

Why are you picking out the data that best supports your thesis? 15–64 shows India and China at exactly the same ratio, even though India has no 1 child policy at all. The gender imbalance problem does not come from the 1 child policy. Don't pick and choose data to fit what you think, look at all of it.

The one child policy was only enacted in 1978. It stands to reason then that the 15-64 bracket isn't fully representing the effects of the policy.

The only brackets that properly account for impact of the policy are the more recent ones.

Just look at it backwards. Even before the 1 child policy, both china and india have had a gender imbalance favouring males. After the 1 child policy in china alone, both india and china had a strong growth in gender imbalance, with china being only somewhat stronger. Your "control" without the 1 child policy also exhibited the same strong growth. A scientist would reasonably conclude that the 1 child policy seems to have little relevance to the issue, considering that another comparable country behaved in exactly the same manner without have such a policy in place.

Both China and India share pretty much exactly the same imbalance until the last two age-cohorts as you suggest, but while both increase, China's does so substantially more. This can't be ignored as being "exactly the same manner". To do so is being scientifically irresponsible.

My take is that both cultures have very prominent views on the preference for male children. You can see this even in the large Chinese and Indian communities here in North America. What has most likely happened is that the one child policy has simply enabled those cultural preferences in China much more than the exist in India.

It's also interesting that India itself has at several times flirted with restrictive population polices, including forced sterilization at right around the same time as China introduced their family planning program.

While that doesn't suggest that the one child policies are the only cause, I think there is enough evidence there to suggest they are a factor.

Nonetheless, all of this wasn't actually a real focus of my original point at all.

Doesn't India have a policy of the parents of the daughter needing to pay for all wedding arrangements, making daughters less desirable?

While this is no doubt going to be unpopular here on HackerNews, I'm going to posit the following: This is almost as bad as have 8 of 9 people being Creationists.
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One child policies that have resulted in a generation of males without females is pretty much exactly the type of policy I'd expect from a group of engineers.

Let us hope that they will do a better job with global politics and economics than they did with domestic policy.

Has there ever been a culture/major world power besotted with its own engineering prowess? Or is this just a way to describe western civilization in the 19th and 20th centuries? (In particular, Britain, United States, the USSR, and Germany.)

"If you look at the best run businesses, they are often composed of people with variable backgrounds - people that approach problems from different perspectives."

Do you have cited studies to back this up?

I must admit that beyond the anecdotal, I do not.

There is a relatively established method though of creating boards of directors and/or leadership "teams" to achieve better decision making patterns; for this exact reason.

The group is more often than not a better performer than the individual.

> Do you have cited studies to back this up?

At first I thought this was satire. You'll excuse me if I take this in a more interesting direction.

Cited studies are not the first and last word on anything, especially when the question is "are scientists better than everyone else?"

Cited studies promote all kinds of false or questionable beliefs, particularly on political issues. As far as finding a study that answers the specific question "are diverse businesses better run?", I promise you won't have to look very far or very hard.

A common sense, thoughtful argument, backed up by information, trumps studies every time. And, surprisingly, an error-prone poll of a population of average intelligence trumps an intellectual's well-thought-out argument---this is why we have polling stations instead of a politburo.

As an aside, I'm slightly more concerned with the generation of Only Children as opposed to the generation of 114 men to 100 girls...just to toss another layer of complexity into the mix.