An Awful Reminder of the Low Status of Women in India

Justin Stoler just sent me a link to a story from the BBC reminding us of the low status of women in India. The headline tells it all: "India estimates that 21 million of its girls are 'unwanted'". Perhaps the only "good" thing about this report is that it comes from a government agency, rather than an NGO.

The desire among parents in India to have sons instead of daughters has created 21 million "unwanted" girls, a government report estimates. The finance ministry report found many couples kept on having children until they had a boy. Authors called this a "subtler form" of son preference than sex-selective abortions but warned it might lead to fewer resources for girls. Son preference was "a matter for Indian society to reflect upon", they said.

The authors also found that 63 million women were "missing" from India's population because the preference for sons led to to sex-selective abortions and more care was given to boys. Tests to determine a foetus's sex are illegal in India, but they still take place and can lead to sex-selective abortions.

Now, if you've read Chapter 6 of my book, you'll remember the discussion about the status of women in India (p.199):

India is a country where the desire for a surviving son is strong, since the Hindu religion requires that parents be buried by their son (Mandelbaum 1974). Malthus was very aware of this stimulus to fertility in India and, in his Essay on Population, quoted an Indian legislator who wrote that under Hindu law a male heir is “an object of the first importance. ‘By a son a man obtains victory over all people; by a son’s son he enjoys immortality; and afterwards by the son of that grandson he reaches the solar abode’” (Malthus 1872 [1971]:116).

The BBC story also points out that girls are a drain on the family economy because they require a dowry to be married (i.e., parents have to pay another family to take the girls off their hands), and then they go off to live with the husband's family, rather than staying around to help her parents. These are cultural characteristics that work against equal status for women and the cultural world turns more slowly than we might wish, I'm afraid. 

Significant Metro Inequalities Exist in Life Expectancy in the U.S.

Almost six years ago I blogged about the major differences in life expectancy by county in the U.S. Marin County, California, topped the list with the highest male life expectancy, and several counties in the south had the lowest life expectancy. A new report, recently summarized by the Washington Post, looks at mortality data for metropolitan areas in the U.S. Keep in mind that for most of human history cities were less healthy than the countryside, but the health transition of the last century has turned that around and cities now have higher life expectancy than the rural areas in almost every corner of the world (it might be that some Chinese cities with lots of smog are less healthy than the surrounding rural areas...). Yet, even among those metro areas there can be important inequalities, some of it accounted for by the demographics of the state in question:

The measure [life expectancy] is closely tied to income and healthy behaviors, which is why it’s perhaps not surprising that residents of Hawaii, with the second-highest median household income in the United States and an active lifestyle, have the longest life expectancy (81.2 years), while Mississippians, with the lowest household income, one of the highest rates of obesity and the sixth-highest rate of smoking, have the shortest (74.9 years). As 24/7 Wall Street, a financial news and opinion site, found out by looking at metropolitan areas, there’s also a wide gap in life expectancy within states such as California, Florida, South Carolina and Texas, much of it explained by variations in the metropolitan areas’ household income and rates of smoking and obesity.

If we look at California, for example, we find that the metro area with the highest life expectancy (83.1 years--both sexes combined) is in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara. This is otherwise known as Silicon Valley, so all of those tech nerds have enough money and a healthy enough lifestyle to stay alive longer than most other people in the U.S. This is also the part of California with the most diverse neighborhoods, as I mentioned a few days ago, including immigrants from East Asia and Western Europe--the areas of the world with the highest life expectancy. Indeed, life expectancy in Silicon Valley is about the same as in Japan or Switzerland. However, if you drive north up the center of California towards Mt. Shasta you'll run into the metro area of Redding. These folks have an average life expectancy that is more than 6 years less than Silicon Valley and is much closer to the levels found in those southern states with the lowest life expectancy in the country. To be sure, these levels are much more similar to what we find in Eastern and Southern Europe and probably for the same reasons--lower levels of income and less healthy lifestyles.

What is the Impact of Demographics on Market Forces?

I don't really know how he does it, but Todd Gardner (@PopGeog) seems to find every story of demographic relevance every day of the year. Today he hit on a story posted on Investopedia.com in which the chief global strategist at Charles Schwab company discusses the importance of demographics on market forces.

Policy – be it monetary, trade, foreign or fiscal – can have an impact on investor sentiment and therefore on investment decisions. But demographics could play a bigger role in the coming decades as the population continues to age in the U.S, said Jeffrey Kleintop, chief global investment strategist at The Charles Schwab Corporation (SCHW).

Still, while there are reasons to worry about the demographic shift and the impact it will have on investing, Kleintop said that it is not all doom and gloom. For starters, he said that economists have not always been right when assessing the impact of demographics. Kleintop pointed to the late 1930s, when growth in the U.S. population started to slow. Alvin Hansen, a Harvard University professor and economist, said at the time that the economy in the U.S. was stuck in "secular stagnation." However, that population and growth slowdown was short lived, with the economy growing thanks to World War II and a surge in new babies starting after the war, ending any of those concerns. That is just one example of how economists can get it wrong by assuming that the worst is going to happen.

So, the story here is actually a pretty familiar one from economists--aging (which is heavily driven by low birth rates) is bad for the market, while high birth rates are good for the market. We can see that clearly from Kleintop when he notes that:

"Demographics are a powerful force, but they aren't the only force," Kleintop wrote in the blog post. "For example, Venezuela has good demographics, but they have been overwhelmed by bad governance."

I disagree 100% with the idea that "Venezuela has good demographics." I have blogged about Venezuela many times over the years, including a piece last November about the birth rate there. The country has way too high a rate of growth considering especially its heavy dependence on oil exports. Yes, good governance would help, but mainly if it were aimed at further lowering the birth rate.

Pennsylvania Court Rules Against Gerrymandered Districts

In the ongoing battle for control of the U.S. House of Representatives via gerrymandered congressional district boundaries, the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the state must immediately redraw its boundaries. As Reuters reports:

In a 5-2 decision, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled the electoral map violated the state’s Constitution by manipulating the district boundaries to marginalize Democratic voters, a practice called partisan gerrymandering.

Democrats, who hold only five of the state’s 18 congressional districts despite Pennsylvania’s status as an electoral swing state, hope to regain control of the House in the November mid-term elections by flipping 24 seats now held by Republicans nationwide.

As a reminder of the importance of the political party approach to gerrymandering, Ozy.com points out that Karl Rove, who engineered the campaign that brought George Bush to the White House in 2000, has put this strategy down on paper:

Consider that, in 2010, when Karl Rove wrote his political opus on redistricting in the Wall Street Journal, it included the prescient line “he who controls redistricting can control Congress,” and one of his prime examples was how Pennsylvania Republicans had redrawn lines to turn an 11–10 Republican-Democrat split in districts based on the 1990 census into a 12–7 advantage following the 2000 census. Today, the conservative edge is even greater: 13–5 in favor of Republicans. As for the state legislature, the split is 121–82 in the House and 34–16 in the Senate. And yet Trump’s margin of victory in the last presidential election was a mere 44,292 votes out of six million cast, suggesting that the state is much more evenly divided politically than its legislature or congressional delegation would indicate.

Since the case in Pennsylvania relied on the state constitution, not on the U.S. Constitution, Reuters notes that the case could avoid being adjudicated by the U.S. Supreme Court. We'll see! 

Was Queen Victoria a Malthusian?

If you are a fan of PBS's "Masterpiece Theater," as my wife and I are, then you have probably already seen the first episode of the second season of "Victoria." This series has thus far brought us into the early days of Queen Victoria's nearly 64-year reign, starting in 1837. Charles Dickens was just gaining fame, and Thomas Robert Malthus had recently died. I mention these two people because they both show up in Season 2, Episode 1, which starts in 1840 after the birth of her first child. The ladies of the court are very complimentary of Dickens' new story, "The Old Curiosity Shop." Dickens was decidedly not a Malthusian, in the sense that he did not agree with the way in which Malthus's ideas had been politicized to suggest that the government should not encourage the poor to have children. Indeed, there is a lot of discussion on the internet that Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" was deliberately anti-Malthusian and that Scrooge was Dickens' representation of Malthus.

Perhaps not coincidentally, a little later in the episode we see Queen Victoria reading aloud from Malthus' "Essay on Population," referencing the geometric growth of populations. She seems in agreement with these sentiments in the TV program, and that squares with comments by a British Historian, Stephanie Polsky, in her book "Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in NeoDickensian London." Indeed, in one page about Victoria, Polsky brings in Malthus, Darwin, and Marx--along with Dickens. Although I don't talk about Dickens in my book, you can get more on the connections between Malthus, Darwin, and Marx in Chapter 3.

Keep in mind that one motivation of the writer(s) of "Victoria" to introduce Malthus might be that Victoria herself had children at what seems like a geometric pace--9 children in the 21 years that she and Albert were married before he died of typhoid fever. They were all married off to various European royalty and Victoria was dubbed "the grandmother of Europe." We could probably have a long discussion about whether that was a good or a bad thing.