How did 100,000,000 women disappear?
thestar.com
thestar.com
Anderson asked villagers about selective abortions and found them open about the fact that they use ultrasound to determine the baby's gender and help them decide whether or not to keep it.
I'm pro-life. I realize that not everyone is. I think that everyone, though, can be concerned that large segments of humanity are testing unborn children for "undesirable" traits and aborting them. We're facing a demographic timebomb.
Societies with more men than women are violent, and start wars.
Curiously, the sex ratio can get skewed by environmental conditions, in a manner similar to what you describe. Men have more reproductive variability than women - the number of children a woman can bear is largely limited by her uterus, while the number of children a man can bear is limited by the number of women he can convince to sleep with him. So when times are good, or if a mother is high-status within her particular group, she tends to bear more sons to take advantage of their reproductive success. While when times are lean, mothers tend to bear more daughters.
A similar effect occurs on the level of individual traits. Couple who carry genes that disproportionately affect the reproductive success of one sex tend to have more children of that sex. For example, someone did a study of Hollywood actors, and found out that 60% of their children are daughters - presumably because Hollywood actors are better-looking than average, and beauty benefits girls more than boys. Taller and more muscular parents tend to have more sons, etc.
And what's the mechanism for this, since everyone knows sex is carried on the male's Y-chromosome, and women shouldn't be able to influence it? Sex-selective abortion. Apparently, females of most mammalian species will absorb the blastocyst into the womb (or otherwise abort very-early-stage fetuses) if environmental conditions aren't right for a child of that sex. So China and India are just using technology to do what biology has done for tens of millions of years.
Can't we agree that the most important bit is actually after the first part of the article, where it states that:
* Once she and Ray broke down the numbers by age group, they found that the majority of excess female deaths came later in life: 66 per cent in India, 55 per cent in China and 83 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.*
They are dying after childbirth, after toddlerhood, because of unequal access to food, medical care and other social services. In China, not only have they tended to undervalue potential daughters, but women kill themselves at a higher rate than men. And in India, full-grown women are being tortured to death because their families have not paid the dowry.
That sounds a lot worse to me.
The number of suicides and kitchen fires is in the 10s of thousands, but the number of missing is in the 10s of millions. That is less than a 1/10 of a percent.
Notice they did not once actually say how the vast majority died. My personal belief is they died in childbirth, since before modern medical care that is unfortunately a common thing (and in those counties that care is not available to either gender).
Of course that belies their argument about discrimination causing it. This is one of those articles where they go in with the conclusion they want: "discrimination" and then look for facts to support it.
Notice at the end how they ask:
"How often are men given mosquito nets to protect themselves from malaria, but not women? How many women die because they are not taken to the hospital when they are sick?"
They ask that, and thus imply it - but never actually show that it's actually the case.
It's a masterful job over all. Not too many people can write like that, implying so many things, and leaving such a picture in peoples minds, without ever actually saying any of those things.
True. Then again, higher numbers of women make a greater contribution to overpopulation. Decreasing the number of women might screw the next generation and sort out the one after that. That's probably an outrageous view, but so's your point.
"Overpopulation" is a phrase used by folks who see humanity as a problem.
The more people we have, the more minds we have.
The resources of the solar system are infinite, in any sense that matters.
The more minds we have working on our problems, the better.
The resources of our planet, however, are not. Do you see a significant number of humans moving off our planet within a couple generations? I admit it's possible, but are you willing to gamble on that?
Keep in mind that the earth is a closed system - none of the resources are ever lost. You just have to find where they went, and get them again. And the more we need, the better we are at finding them.
The only real input is energy, and that too is infinite. Nuclear power (with reprocessing) can last us for centuries, and I'm sure we'll figure out fusion before that runs out.
Anyways, if more countries are to reach developed status then no matter how you look at it we have a problem. It's not the apocalypse, but we'll feel it.
There is not a fixed amount that can be produced. More counties developing will mean more consumption, but also more production.
There are other resources too. Every technology consumes some amount of hard-to-replace materials. There are a lot of rare metals in a computer or a monitor. So far the market absorbed any shortages, but imagine a 10x increase and suddenly high prices due to lack of basic materials don't seem impossible.
Even iron is not unlimited. Wikipedia says we have 800 million cars on the roads. Make that 3 billion and you start scraping for steel. Aluminium too. Pretty much everything we mine will see sharp increases in price sooner or later - and it would be very unlikely _not_ to run out of something with a 2x or 3x increase in consumption.
No offence, but at this point I suspect you are not very intellectually honest. I said at the beginning I do not believe this to be a huge problem - solutions will come. But I do not understand your insistence that there is no problem at all.
And iron is a bad example anyway: the entire planet is made of metal (rock is a metal oxide, usually silicon but plenty of others also).
There are things that we don't have enough of, but if there is a shortage of one element a substitute will be found (for example graphite in pencils, it was available in just one mine which ran out, and a substitute was found).
Edit: to explain, we DO live in a simulated reality, in reality we are stuck in a tiny space with some wires to the outside world. The difference to the Matrix scenario is that we carry the computers doing the simulation around with us (our brains) - or at least so we think.
No, no, no. The rest of humanity is a problem. I'm perfectly fine.
We're not talking about overpopulation of the planet; we're talking about a limited geographic area with finite amount of resources. Who cares that Jupiter has valuable hyrdocarbons when your village is starving?
Historically humans did massive migrations, and animals still do.
Wasn't there a story here from a couple of days ago, on how expensive it is for the groom's family to get a bride in China these days?