Contemporary Jahilliyah : Worse than eve…
Contemporary Jahilliyah : Worse than ever before?
“Wa idhal-maw’udatu su’ilat
Bi-ayyi dhambin qutilat”
Economist Cover Story This Week: Gendercide: The War on Baby Girls
Killed, aborted, or neglected at least 100 million girls have disappeared and the number is rising.
cbarwa, 
Arwi, 
Willow 11:15 pm on March 5, 2010 Permalink |
Incredible and chilling. May God have mercy on these poor murdered infants.
Arwi 11:54 pm on March 5, 2010 Permalink |
Within China and India the areas with the worst sex ratios are the richest, best-educated ones.
Not really true of India — sex ratio vs income. Karnataka is one of the richest states and has one of the best sex ratios.
razib, murtad fitri 1:05 am on March 6, 2010 Permalink |
it is true. geographic data isn’t always useful, especially at that coarse scale. in any case, it’s a cross-cultural truism that elites tend to be male biased in hierarchical societies. this is true in asia and it was true in medieval europe. the lower classes tend to be female biased. the reason usually given is hypergamy, as well as the excessive returns on sons accrued to elite women (since sons generally control and can expand family wealth and power).
in any case, the assertion is true, as anyone who looks into the social science data for india, and the indian diaspora, knows.
Arwi 1:35 am on March 6, 2010 Permalink |
Within a society, elites may be more male-biased, but there are differences of degree between societies, and the North is much more male-biased than the South.
cbarwa 1:14 pm on March 6, 2010 Permalink |
Not really true of India — sex ratio vs income. Karnataka is one of the richest states and has one of the best sex ratios.
That reflects a North-South divide; but if you look at district leval data – that the latest book by edited by the demographers Tim Dyson and Monica Das Gupta contains; you can see that rapidly growing urban centres like Salem, Chennai, Bangalore etc. have poor Juvenile Sex Ratios, comparable to what we see in the north.
Arwi 6:46 pm on March 6, 2010 Permalink |
Thanks, I will take a look. This has district level maps over time, up to 2001. The Salem/Arcot zone notoriously anomalous and much worse than richer areas of the South, which is again about culture.
cbarwa 7:48 am on March 9, 2010 Permalink |
I made a mistake, the book is titled “21st Century India” and it is edited by Tim Dyson, Robert Cassen and Leela Visaria. Dyson launched it a few years ago back at the LSE, it was part of ahuge Wellcome Trust funded project on India: the district level data he reproduced shows that the urban centres show a marked deterioration in the juvenile sex ratio, and the projections are quite bad, even for urban areas in the south. He doesn’t susbscribe to the arguement about the north-south divide holding true once urbanisation, income growth and use of pre-natal scans are taken into account. I don’t know the latest literature on this but it is worth taking a look at these arguements. IMO female literacy, participation in the labour force and implementation of access to property rights are better indicators of this than culture at an aggregate level.
cbarwa 1:22 pm on March 6, 2010 Permalink |
The Economist being the Economist, leaves out some of the structural reasons; for South Asia at least, there is a large degree of correlation between adverse sex ratios and public investment in female literacy and property rights, especially regarding land, enjoyed by women. Regions where women effectively lack any legal/traditional rights in landed property, like the northwest (ironically almost identical to the Green Revolution triangle of Punjab, Haryana and Western UP) suffer the worst from this problem; interestingly within India there is a marked difference between Hindus and Muslims on this front, with Muslims having a much more ‘normal’ sex ratio than Hindus. As a rule few of the regions in Asia that suffer from such imbalanced sex ratios are predominantly Muslims; the only one I can think of is Aceh.