6 ms·

Markets always appear next to scarcity, and laws against market operations always drive transactions underground, because supply and demand must be made to meet

Markets always appear next to scarcity, and laws against market operations always drive transactions underground, because supply and demand must be made to meet somehow. Without expressing approval per se of what's happening in China, I do have to express a total lack of surprise that people react to scarcity in one area in the same way they react to scarcity in every other. Extreme gender imbalances are societally destabilizing, and the Chinese government, which is obsessed with social stability, should have reacted much faster once it noticed the gender gap in newborns. Now, it's too late, and a generation will be unhappy.

kown223 8y ago
assuming those in control are there for meritocracy and are competent and that's why are there, they would have reacted, but no, are there due to their parens/people they know, and bribes.
watwut 8y ago
Are gender imbalances destabilising historically? It woild be interesting to see the history. After wars there was lack of men in some areas. Excess of men was during gold rush, in Australia and is in silicon valley. (I am not sure how much it proves or disproved theory.)
- geoffmunn 8y ago
  As a positive twist, women got the vote in New Zealand partly because of fears that a surplus of rowdy men 'on the frontier' would cause problems. Giving women the vote would give families more leverage in Parliament.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    Fears by who(m)? There must be some interesting partisan politics you are barely hinting at.
    - geoffmunn 8y ago
      https://theconversation.com/why-new-zealand-was-the-first-country-where-women-won-the-right-to-vote-103219 https://theconversation.com/why-new-zealand-was-the-first-co... Women as moral citizens As a “colonial frontier”, New Zealand had a surplus of men, especially in resource towns. Pragmatically, this placed a premium on women for their part as wives, mothers and moral compasses. There was a fear of a chaotic frontier full of marauding single men. This colonial context saw conservative men who supported family values supporting suffrage. During the 1880s, depression and its accompanying poverty, sexual licence and drunken disorder further enhanced women’s value as settling maternal figures. Women voters promised a stabilising effect on society.
  - ThinkingGuy 8y ago
    We had a similar phenomenon in the US, with the "frontier" territories being among the first places to allow women to vote (at the local level), years before US Constitution was ammended to make it nation-wide. https://constitutioncenter.org/timeline/html/cw08_12159.html https://constitutioncenter.org/timeline/html/cw08_12159.html
- thrower123 8y ago
  In China, yes, very much so. Historically, when gender imbalances have gotten to the levels in the current statistics, rebellion and violent millenarian religious cults have found fertile ground, when times turned tougher. Having an excess of downtrodden single men without much to lose is not a great situation for stability anywhere.
  - watwut 8y ago
    Thank you. How did it happened? They killed female babies?
    - thrower123 8y ago
      It's been a considerable time since I was doing coursework on that period, but in broad strokes I recall it went something like this: 1.) Culturally, there was a broad understanding that males remain within their birth family lineages, whereas women leave and join their husband's family. 2.) Male children were expected to provide for their parents in old age, whereas (again if I recall correctly) it was customary to offer a dowry when female children were married. 3.) As a result wealth tended to transfer from female-heavy lineages to male-heavy lineages. 4.) When new land was available, or technology or new crops could make old land more productive, this effect was manageable, but increased pressure when population butted up against technical limits of agriculture, so that additional new arable land (wealth) could not be easily made available. Particularly when infrastructure and ecological failures strained or reduced the capacity of productive land. In that more zero-sum environment, male children were correspondingly more valuable, and there were upticks in female infanticide. There's another dynamic in play with regards to the Chinese bureaucratic governmental system, which only men could take advantage of - in the archtypical system, entry into the bureacratic class was at least nominally meritocratic, and through grueling work and education, one could become eligible to take and pass the examinations to gain the bureaucratic degrees, which conferred massive benefits, which were again expected to accrue to not only the newly-minted official, but their family groups. So there are instances of family lineages and even entire villages pooling their resources behind a favored son, investing massively in classical education in hopes of hitting the lottery that way.
- gaius 8y ago
  Are gender imbalances destabilising historically? It woild be interesting to see the history. I've often wondered to what extent it explains the situation in Afghanistan. If there is a shortage of women anyway due to poor healthcare and other factors, and some men get to have multiple wives, what do the other men do?
  - watwut 8y ago
    Might have more to do with armies (Russian) making Afghanistan their playground in the past and Americans sponsor in resistance (terrorism) to defend.
draugadrotten 8y ago
> Extreme gender imbalances are societally destabilizing Imagine what will happen in Northern Europe after the large influx of asian single men who will want to marry in a few years. China - 114 men for 100 women (wikipedia) Sweden - 123 men for 100 women (BBC) https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35444173 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35444173
- sexydefinesher 8y ago
  As stated in the article, most of these men/youth have the opportunity for bringing over their families which would smooth-en out the gender imbalances.
  - gaius 8y ago
    But possibly not within their age cohort; that 123:100 ratio is within the 16-17 year bracket, not in Sweden as a whole.
throw930336 8y ago
It's not too late. China is lucky in that they border a country with the opposite problem [1]: > One feature of the Russian-Chinese relationship seemed especially telling: Cross-border marriages are overwhelmingly between Chinese men and Russian women. Much of this has to do with demographics—Russia has a surplus of women, while China has too many men. In addition, the demographics issue might be overstated as many of the 'missing women' started to be 'found' once they turned 18 and needed to officially register with the government [2]: > The researchers believe local government officials informally worked with farmers and acknowledged that they couldn't fully enforce the one-child policy. Instead they made tacit agreements in allowing families to have extra children in exchange for social stability in their communities. The cadres, or local governments, would then under-report “out of plan” births that ultimately influenced the national population statistics. > To supplement the qualitative data, the researchers then examined Chinese population data by cohort, and they compared the number of children born in 1990 with the number of 20-year-old Chinese men and women in 2010. In that cohort, they discovered 4 million additional people, and of those there were approximately 1 million more women than men. > "If we go over a course of 25 years, it's possible there are about 25 million women in the statistics that weren't there at birth," Kennedy said. 1. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/features/2009/where_russia_meets_china/why_are_siberian_russians_drawn_to_china.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/f... 2. https://news.ku.edu/2016/11/22/study-finds-chinas-missing-girls-theory-likely-far-overblown https://news.ku.edu/2016/11/22/study-finds-chinas-missing-gi...
- throw930336 8y ago
  (Can't seem to edit my post so I'll add an additional comment) One of biggest issues with the 1-child policy is that it affected the middle class much more severely than the ultra-wealth and the rural countryfolk, > Min was born in 1986, six years after the one-child policy came into effect. She is the second of five children, a reflection of lax enforcement of family planning in the Hebei farming village where she grew up. (Min's father told me that one family in the village had six children; another man, who had fathered seven children, had been the village chief.) > Min herself, along with everyone she knows, has two children. > When history's largest social experiment in state-regulated childbearing comes to an end, it will have been borne disproportionately by the Chinese urban middle-class. The elaborate machinery built to enforce these policies barely touched Min at all. She was ignored by the government, living at the margins--in China, that's often the best place to be. https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/03/why-the-one-child-policy-has-become-irrelevant/274178/ https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/03/why-the-on...

kown223 8y ago

assuming those in control are there for meritocracy and are competent and that's why are there, they would have reacted, but no, are there due to their parens/people they know, and bribes.

watwut 8y ago

Are gender imbalances destabilising historically? It woild be interesting to see the history. After wars there was lack of men in some areas. Excess of men was during gold rush, in Australia and is in silicon valley. (I am not sure how much it proves or disproved theory.)

geoffmunn 8y ago
As a positive twist, women got the vote in New Zealand partly because of fears that a surplus of rowdy men 'on the frontier' would cause problems. Giving women the vote would give families more leverage in Parliament.
- jacobush 8y ago
  Fears by who(m)? There must be some interesting partisan politics you are barely hinting at.
  - geoffmunn 8y ago
    https://theconversation.com/why-new-zealand-was-the-first-country-where-women-won-the-right-to-vote-103219 https://theconversation.com/why-new-zealand-was-the-first-co... Women as moral citizens As a “colonial frontier”, New Zealand had a surplus of men, especially in resource towns. Pragmatically, this placed a premium on women for their part as wives, mothers and moral compasses. There was a fear of a chaotic frontier full of marauding single men. This colonial context saw conservative men who supported family values supporting suffrage. During the 1880s, depression and its accompanying poverty, sexual licence and drunken disorder further enhanced women’s value as settling maternal figures. Women voters promised a stabilising effect on society.
- ThinkingGuy 8y ago
  We had a similar phenomenon in the US, with the "frontier" territories being among the first places to allow women to vote (at the local level), years before US Constitution was ammended to make it nation-wide. https://constitutioncenter.org/timeline/html/cw08_12159.html https://constitutioncenter.org/timeline/html/cw08_12159.html
thrower123 8y ago
In China, yes, very much so. Historically, when gender imbalances have gotten to the levels in the current statistics, rebellion and violent millenarian religious cults have found fertile ground, when times turned tougher. Having an excess of downtrodden single men without much to lose is not a great situation for stability anywhere.
- watwut 8y ago
  Thank you. How did it happened? They killed female babies?
  - thrower123 8y ago
    It's been a considerable time since I was doing coursework on that period, but in broad strokes I recall it went something like this: 1.) Culturally, there was a broad understanding that males remain within their birth family lineages, whereas women leave and join their husband's family. 2.) Male children were expected to provide for their parents in old age, whereas (again if I recall correctly) it was customary to offer a dowry when female children were married. 3.) As a result wealth tended to transfer from female-heavy lineages to male-heavy lineages. 4.) When new land was available, or technology or new crops could make old land more productive, this effect was manageable, but increased pressure when population butted up against technical limits of agriculture, so that additional new arable land (wealth) could not be easily made available. Particularly when infrastructure and ecological failures strained or reduced the capacity of productive land. In that more zero-sum environment, male children were correspondingly more valuable, and there were upticks in female infanticide. There's another dynamic in play with regards to the Chinese bureaucratic governmental system, which only men could take advantage of - in the archtypical system, entry into the bureacratic class was at least nominally meritocratic, and through grueling work and education, one could become eligible to take and pass the examinations to gain the bureaucratic degrees, which conferred massive benefits, which were again expected to accrue to not only the newly-minted official, but their family groups. So there are instances of family lineages and even entire villages pooling their resources behind a favored son, investing massively in classical education in hopes of hitting the lottery that way.
gaius 8y ago
Are gender imbalances destabilising historically? It woild be interesting to see the history. I've often wondered to what extent it explains the situation in Afghanistan. If there is a shortage of women anyway due to poor healthcare and other factors, and some men get to have multiple wives, what do the other men do?
- watwut 8y ago
  Might have more to do with armies (Russian) making Afghanistan their playground in the past and Americans sponsor in resistance (terrorism) to defend.

draugadrotten 8y ago

> Extreme gender imbalances are societally destabilizing Imagine what will happen in Northern Europe after the large influx of asian single men who will want to marry in a few years. China - 114 men for 100 women (wikipedia) Sweden - 123 men for 100 women (BBC) https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35444173 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35444173

sexydefinesher 8y ago
As stated in the article, most of these men/youth have the opportunity for bringing over their families which would smooth-en out the gender imbalances.
- gaius 8y ago
  But possibly not within their age cohort; that 123:100 ratio is within the 16-17 year bracket, not in Sweden as a whole.

throw930336 8y ago

It's not too late. China is lucky in that they border a country with the opposite problem [1]: > One feature of the Russian-Chinese relationship seemed especially telling: Cross-border marriages are overwhelmingly between Chinese men and Russian women. Much of this has to do with demographics—Russia has a surplus of women, while China has too many men. In addition, the demographics issue might be overstated as many of the 'missing women' started to be 'found' once they turned 18 and needed to officially register with the government [2]: > The researchers believe local government officials informally worked with farmers and acknowledged that they couldn't fully enforce the one-child policy. Instead they made tacit agreements in allowing families to have extra children in exchange for social stability in their communities. The cadres, or local governments, would then under-report “out of plan” births that ultimately influenced the national population statistics. > To supplement the qualitative data, the researchers then examined Chinese population data by cohort, and they compared the number of children born in 1990 with the number of 20-year-old Chinese men and women in 2010. In that cohort, they discovered 4 million additional people, and of those there were approximately 1 million more women than men. > "If we go over a course of 25 years, it's possible there are about 25 million women in the statistics that weren't there at birth," Kennedy said. 1. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/features/2009/where_russia_meets_china/why_are_siberian_russians_drawn_to_china.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/f... 2. https://news.ku.edu/2016/11/22/study-finds-chinas-missing-girls-theory-likely-far-overblown https://news.ku.edu/2016/11/22/study-finds-chinas-missing-gi...

throw930336 8y ago
(Can't seem to edit my post so I'll add an additional comment) One of biggest issues with the 1-child policy is that it affected the middle class much more severely than the ultra-wealth and the rural countryfolk, > Min was born in 1986, six years after the one-child policy came into effect. She is the second of five children, a reflection of lax enforcement of family planning in the Hebei farming village where she grew up. (Min's father told me that one family in the village had six children; another man, who had fathered seven children, had been the village chief.) > Min herself, along with everyone she knows, has two children. > When history's largest social experiment in state-regulated childbearing comes to an end, it will have been borne disproportionately by the Chinese urban middle-class. The elaborate machinery built to enforce these policies barely touched Min at all. She was ignored by the government, living at the margins--in China, that's often the best place to be. https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/03/why-the-one-child-policy-has-become-irrelevant/274178/ https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/03/why-the-on...