« Easter painting from Mexico | Main | How will the web affect TV shows? »
The Gender Imbalance Disequilibrium
China's gender imbalance is now 117 boys for every 100 girls and for second and third children (when allowed) the imbalance can be as high as 151 boys for every 100 girls. Millions of men, perhaps 15% of the population, may not be able to find wives.
"The world has never before seen the likes of the bride shortage that will be unfolding in China in the decades ahead," says AEI demographer Nicholas Eberstadt.
The Chinese government has responded by making selective abortion illegal and by giving significant bonuses to parents of girls. Yet blackmarket ultrasound is available and, according to 60 Minutes, in demand. Some reports suggest that the gender imbalance is increasing.
Yet from the perspective of evolutionary fitness having a girl in China is now much better than having a boy. Boys who can't find mates won't be giving their parents any grandchildren. Will it take a generation of parents without grandchildren for evolutionary incentives to kick in? Why hasn't this happened already? How hard is it to figure out that having a boy, especially if you are poor, means the end of your lineage?
Hat tip to Paul Rubin for pointing out this puzzle to me.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on April 17, 2006 at 07:14 AM in Economics, Science | Permalink
Comments
Has it not been shown that significant increases in societal violence - both domestic crime and war - are highly correlated with abnormally large populations of males between the ages of 15-25?
Posted by: martin at Apr 17, 2006 9:34:16 AM
There has been similar talk about India too along with reports that in some parts of India the gap is so huge now that brothers are banding together to "buy" a common wife.
Maybe the parents have figured out that a poor girl is likely to be forced into polyandry?
Posted by: Eswaran at Apr 17, 2006 9:38:16 AM
I am not an expert on Chinese culture, so take my comment with a grain of
salt.
I believe the culture is such that the wife becomes part of the husband's
family, but the reverse is not true. Thus, whether their daughter has
children or not, their lineage, in a sense, ends.
Posted by: Jim Clay at Apr 17, 2006 9:41:26 AM
Jim Clay is correct. Along with the fact that parents still rely on their children to support them in retirement, it makes sense that parents would want sons; daughters aren't going to support them when they're old.
Posted by: Hei Lun Chan at Apr 17, 2006 9:52:50 AM
I am not sure whether the end of lineage has such negative weight on one's utility function. I guess chinese behavior is signaling large short term benefits of having a boy.
Posted by: dsVasques at Apr 17, 2006 9:56:02 AM
In any event, isn't there significant non-reporting of female births in much of China?
Posted by: Peter at Apr 17, 2006 9:58:22 AM
This always strikes me as one of the more notable failures of Classical Economic Theory, precisely because it persists. I spent some time in India last summer, and although I can't find the link, I remember reading stories of how farmers in rural Punjab were buying tractors that they could never possibly use on their small plots of land in order to impress potential brides' families. This in a region where the gender ratio is now nearly the same as the one you stated (~1.15 to 1 I think). India has nothing like a one-child policy, so I don't see how this is anything but a market failure, so to speak.
Posted by: Lee at Apr 17, 2006 10:03:30 AM
Would the population issue be that big of a problem if they switched from a "one child policy" to a "two child policy"?
If a "two child policy" would work in terms of total population, then they could institute a different policy that would have similar effects on population, but be more incentive-compatible with respect to gender ratios: a "one boy policy". Every couple can keep having children until they've had one boy, after which they aren't allowed to have any more children.
If every couple chose to continue to have children and did not engage in any manipulation, then this policy would produce an average of two children per couple, with half of them male and half female. Couples who want more children would have incentives to produce females, and only couples who both want a boy and are near the limit of the number of children that they want would have an incentives to produce male children. If there is a strong desire for having just one or two kids, and for having at least one boy, then this new policy wouldn't have much of an impact, but otherwise the mixed incentives would probably lead to something close to even gender ratios and a 2 kid per couple average.
Posted by: Blar at Apr 17, 2006 10:37:22 AM
"India has nothing like a one-child policy, so I don't see how this is anything but a market failure, so to speak."
Well, India has also tried a lot of government remedies, including outlawing the practice, to no avail. So it's equally a failure of government.
India also has the same tradition of a wife leaving her parents' family and joining the husbands. Note that in India, the wealthier and more educated the mother, the more likely that she uses sex-selective abortion to guarantee a son.
I don't think in either case it's really a failure of economic theory. Sex-selective abortion became much more prominent in the late 20th century with ultrasound, and so there is a question of how long it would persist. Yes, one would expect the dowry tradition to turn into bride price eventually; there are apparently very deep-seated cultural and other reasons that make them view women as less valuable. Economic theory accepts that cultural preferences exist.
Posted by: John Thacker at Apr 17, 2006 10:37:36 AM
The surplus males problem is only really starting to be a strong issue. In about 10 to 15 years we'll see it really come to the forefront.
Posted by: John Thacker at Apr 17, 2006 10:38:43 AM
Note that the problem is not with economic theory but with evolutionary theory! As far is evolution is concerned whether the daugher becomes a part of her husband's family is irrelevant - genes are genes and evolution "maximizes" genetic fitness. My surprise is that the evolutionary incentives don't appear to be as strong as one might have thought.
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Apr 17, 2006 10:48:50 AM
As Peter Schwartz (of GBN.com) and others have pointed out, China will see a rise in mail-order brides from other countries. Chinese men, unable to marry in their own country, will go abroad and find wives, eventually bringing them back home.
Posted by: Richard Sprague at Apr 17, 2006 10:51:17 AM
Ask them why they have sons, and they will tell you it is because sons
take care of them in their old age. Whether the sons have wives is
not relevant to their parents. It's not the parent's problem if there is
no one to take care of their son when he is old.
Posted by: wkwillis at Apr 17, 2006 11:07:12 AM
Alex,
I suppose you're going to be *really* confused about the existence of contraception and abortion, then. The evolutionary incentives work on genes, not minds. They work on minds only via the mechanism of genes that were selected for historically, and presumably most of that selection happened in a *really* different environment than we have now. Certainly, most of it didn't involve sex-selective abortions or laws restricting each pair of parents to one child, though it did involve the possibility of sex-selective infanticide.
Posted by: albatross at Apr 17, 2006 11:24:21 AM
A couple of thoughts as to why the "rational response" Prof. Tabarrok describes may not be occurring:
1. Coordination problem. Traditionally males tend to marry women a few years younger than them; perhaps parents today think that parents in a few years, with this same information, will reverse the trend. When that 2nd group of parents has more female children, voila! - the 1st group's males will have females to marry. (Why take a chance on a reversal of cultural norms that may take decades to occur?) However, I do not know if the older male-younger female pattern occurs in China.
2. Information problems. For people to respond rationally to this setup, the parents of the "bottom 17 out of every 117 boys" must realize that they ARE the bottom 17. However, I suspect that these people either
a. do not realize they ARE the bottom 15% - some interesting psych studies show that those at the bottom tend to overestimate their relative performance, and I see no reason why this should not apply to parents as well. (If anything, anecdotal evidence seems to indicate this effect is even STRONGER among parents evaluating their childrens' relative desirability...)
b. do not realize the magnitude of the problem - the "bottom 15%" parents are likely not to be the more well-educated, better-off parents connected to society at large. Thus they may not know that the male/female imbalance is a problem, or even if they observe it locally, they may think that it is ONLY a local, and not a nationwide, problem - IE "my village just happens to have a few more boys than girls every year, I'm sure the next village over doesn't have this problem and we can always find girls there."
Posted by: Vasu V at Apr 17, 2006 12:21:21 PM
I don't know about modern Chinese culture, but in my family (Chinese, US citizens since 1984), there is a bit of a taboo against younger men marrying older women. But necessity will get its vote as well...
Posted by: Klug at Apr 17, 2006 1:03:41 PM
The "bottom 15%" parents are likely not to be the more well-educated, better-off parents connected to society at large.
Ah, but as I mentioned, several studies have shown that the less-educated, worse-off parents are more likely to let their girls be born rather than aborting them, at least in India. See here, among other places. This was part of the famous Lancet study released recently.
There is an evolutionary argument that this makes sense, of course, since the sons of less-educated, worse-off parents will be the ones less likely to marry, as you note.
Posted by: John Thacker at Apr 17, 2006 1:21:54 PM
No parent believes their child will be in the bottom 15% of their peer group.
Posted by: Dan at Apr 17, 2006 1:45:41 PM
"No parent believes their child will be in the bottom 15% of their peer group."
The wisest comment here!
Posted by: Half Sigma at Apr 17, 2006 4:33:59 PM
"Note that the problem is not with economic theory but with evolutionary theory! As far is evolution is concerned whether the daugher becomes a part of her husband's family is irrelevant - genes are genes and evolution "maximizes" genetic fitness. My surprise is that the evolutionary incentives don't appear to be as strong as one might have thought."
No, they're just slow. As evidenced by the fact that people still use contraception.
Posted by: Ken at Apr 17, 2006 5:28:28 PM
There was an article in the Economist recently that attributed this to some disease, and not to parental gender selectivity. I don't remember which issue or which disease. Anyone remember this?
Posted by: Whole Sigma at Apr 17, 2006 7:01:13 PM
So let's get this clear:
About 150 million or so boys will not be able to get wives in the future.
These men are either from the poorest of the Chinese and Indian families (precisely the families who AREN'T using sex selection) or they are from even poorer neighbouring countries like Burma or North Korea, whose women have been enticed away by the wealthier Chinese/Indians.
So the families using sex selection don't miss out at all. Where's the contradiction?
Posted by: Patrick at Apr 17, 2006 7:05:48 PM
Whole Sigma:
If you follow the wikipedia link I provided, you'll see reference and a link to Emily Oster's work implying that Hepitatis B is at least partially responsible for some of the sex-difference.
Posted by: John Thacker at Apr 17, 2006 9:16:46 PM
In re: Emily Oster's paper. As John Thacker notes, Oster's work says that Hepatitis B is responsible for only some of skewed sex ratio in India and China. Since China has the one child policy it is not feasible to do this analysis, but for India, it turns out that the probability of the next born child being a girl declines as the number of female children in the family increases. In other words, there might be a 47% chance the first-born will be a girl, but conditional on the first-born being a girl, the chance of the second-born being female might only be 43% (and it declines with more girls). I think a similar study has been done for Taiwan which can be considered culturally closer to mainland China. As far as I know, there is no known biological explanation for this, leading to the conclusion that parents are engaging in selective abortion.
Posted by: Mark at Apr 17, 2006 9:56:56 PM
As south park has shown, guys who can't get laid are dangerous. People driven by their genes and frustrated by society will lash out in violent directions. Just look at what some people are willing to do for the promise of 72 virgins.
Posted by: bago at Apr 17, 2006 11:33:06 PM
