Jul

23

Mara Hvistendahl , the author of "Unnatural Selection" was on TV a week or so ago and suggested male-female ratio imbalances will cause some Asian countries to become like the American "Wild West" and more war-like and aggressive in nature in the future. Interesting (if not flawed) idea with possible market implications (at least until equilibrium is re-established).

It sounded a bit Malthusian though too…

from an article on npr:

As men find it more difficult to find wives in these countries, Hvistendahl says, "it is leading to unrest and almost certainly will lead to more." Unmarried men are responsible for more violent crime than married men. And, Hvistendahl adds, research in eastern China showed a correlation between a high male-to-female sex ratio and the crime rate.

Don Boudreaux adds:


In light of the fact that the most creative and versatile resource (by far) is the human mind, world population today truly is not too great but, rather, too small. Far too small.


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3 Comments so far

  1. Ed on July 25, 2011 9:28 am

    “In light of the fact that the most creative and versatile resource (by far) is the human mind, world population today truly is not too great but, rather, too small. Far too small.”

    How naive. It matters WHO is reproducing. Today, we subsidize the underclass/low IQ population on a global basis which is where a large % of population growth comes from. The global underclass has a hereditary IQ between 70 and 85. Not much innovation, in fact none, will come from such a place.

    Might not be PC but on net these people will never be contributors but only parasitic takers. As globalism and technology squeeze the middle, the population will eventually break off into two distinct sub-species that might lose the ability to even create viable offspring.

    At that point the idiocratic underclass that is capable of being civilized will make up a servant class. The others will likely be eliminated. Not by today’s primative bombs or guns, but rather by mass, non-voluntary sterilization. Sterilization will effectively be weaponized and applied to large nuisance populations, even entire nations.

    Hey I could be wrong but that is how I see the population problem evolving.

  2. Steve on July 25, 2011 9:36 am

    Its funny the article doesn’t mention the Chinese state’s one child policy. I suppose NPR refuses to acknowledge even one example of the evils of central planning. To them its another “market failure” that needs policing from expert policy makers.

  3. Don Chu on July 25, 2011 7:22 pm

    The different tones and diverging intentions of the above post and comments are revealing.
    Misguided, but still, rather funny…

    Ah, its the old Eloi versus Morlocks demographics/evolution/eugenics debate again.

    As H. G. Wells’ Über-Morlock character silkily thundered:

    Who are you to question 800,000 years … of evolution!

    –The Time Machine (1895)

    [But that’s just Wells in his book; really for us, its only been about 80,000 years (from what we know of evolutionary genetics, so far at least), and its already brought us to where we are now…]

    From one species, Man became two:
    [The Time Machine (2002)]
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3E86bQw9NQ

    But hey, perhaps the ‘Flynn Effect’ might save us yet…
    [See any of James Flynn’s writings for one of the better unbiased perspective on this hugely taboo subject, especially his “What is intelligence?: beyond the Flynn effect”.]

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