Asymmetrical Information

I read that artice in the NY Times about the sex select as well. I think what it really shows is that women prefer girls and men prefer boys. Landsburg concludes that parents prefer boys, but it sure looks like fathers prefer boys and are less likely to leave a son than a daughter.

In the US, the cultural and financial imbalance of marriage are less, and the father's preference less important. That's why women with sufficient resources to pay for an expensive sex selection method are looking for girls. That's how I read the data anyway.

The NYT Magazine article you mention was filled with women longing for a little girl, not fathers longing for a daughter. As they very happy father of 2 daughters, I must be the exception that proves the rule.

I thought many of the people who sex-select their children do so to avoid X-linked diseases which are predominately dangerous to boys rather than girls.

My wife and I are adopting a baby. Because we already have a son, we can choose to adopt a daughter; typically, however, prospective adoptive parents CANNOT choose the gender of their child. Why? Because, as the adoption agency explained it to us, 90% of adoptive parents would prefer a girl.

Hmmmm!

"So feminists should be running screaming in the other direction from the quasi-marxist "sustainable community" model. The only way we'll get true equality is to get rich! rich! rich!"

Duh! With wealth and technology, physical strength becomes less important, and that was the only real advantage men ever had.

Does anyone know if Lansburg has his cited data correct? He has a history of making shit up for that Slate column.

Uh, you realize of course, that when the Beach Boys sang "Two Girls For Every Boy" they weren't exactly concerned with the welfare of the distaff side! ^_^;

"Even though, for reasons I don't recall, the attempt to get a boy had a higher success rate, 2/3 of the couple who went to the clinic were trying for a girl, not a boy."

This would imply that in the subsequent generation some girls would either have to 1.) Accept polygamy as a part of their lifestyle and teach their daughters to do so as well 2.) Learn to date other girls or 3.) End up being very, very lonely.

The boys of that generation on the other hand would end up incredibly, incredibly spoiled since the girls would really have to be at their beck and call in order to get male attention ("Can we say 'Seller's Market', boys and girls? I *knew* we could!" ^_^ ).

So much for "true equality"! :P

OTOH, this could give new meaning to the phrase "contrarian investing". Any parent concerned about his child's future would have to secondguess the dating market as well as the stock market whenever they worked on conception. ^_~

Actually, the variety of statistics about likelihood to marry, stay married, have another child, etc. offer an excellent starting point for determining what the basis of this preference is and who has it. Comparing a preference for sons over daughters from one country to another is useful, but linking it to income is an oversimplification. There are so many differences between the cultures in the countries mentioned that could obviously effect people's preferences. The ones that come to my mind immediately are religion, political stability, legal rights of women, and language. Yes, even language. Assuming a significant portion of the population went to school, what books did they read growing up?

The likelihood that people will get married in the US has dropped significantly over the past few decades. The likelihood that they will stay married has dropped even more. The differences over time are much greater than the disparity between the parents of girls and boys. The reasons that people marry and divorce are incredibly complex. Disentangling the various factors is going to be even harder because some of the strongest factors are not objectively observable.

I don't buy the "greater wealth = greater desire for girls" argument, as it doesn't make sense from a biological point of view. Reproductively speaking, boys are a high-risk, high-return investment, with a much greater variance in the number of grandchildren they bring one than girls do. Consequently, a preference for boys ought to go up with wealth rather than down, at least within the context of a single society.

If westerners show less of a preference for boys than they used to (and others still do), it isn't because they've gotten wealthier. I'd look to the change in attitudes propagated by feminism for the real reason behind the reduced intensity of this bias.

"I thought many of the people who sex-select their children do so to avoid X-linked diseases which are predominately dangerous to boys rather than girls."

This seems like a much more likely reason for the preference for girls in that setting.

"Duh! With wealth and technology, physical strength becomes less important, and that was the only real advantage men ever had."

Not at all. A son can spread one's genes a lot further and wider than a daughter can, and technology isn't about to change this reality any time soon.

I don't buy the "greater wealth = greater desire for girls" argument, as it doesn't make sense from a biological point of view. Reproductively speaking, boys are a high-risk, high-return investment, with a much greater variance in the number of grandchildren they bring one than girls do. Consequently, a preference for boys ought to go up with wealth rather than down, at least within the context of a single society.

If westerners show less of a preference for boys than they used to (and others still do), it isn't because they've gotten wealthier. I'd look to the change in attitudes propagated by feminism for the real reason behind the reduced intensity of this bias.

"I thought many of the people who sex-select their children do so to avoid X-linked diseases which are predominately dangerous to boys rather than girls."

This seems like a much more likely reason for the preference for girls in that setting.

"Duh! With wealth and technology, physical strength becomes less important, and that was the only real advantage men ever had."

Not at all. A son can spread one's genes a lot further and wider than a daughter can, and technology isn't about to change this reality any time soon.

Abiola - I understand your skepticism about a simple wealth connection, but I don't think your specific genetic explanation, while it is plausible on the face of it, would stand up to scrutiny. The adaptive (biological) advantage is in producing the sex that happens to be the "limiting factor" in a given environment. And female offspring are a better bet for "gene spreading", for example, if the parents lack attributes such as size and strength that would enable a male offspring to compete successfully with other males. In other words, if sex preference were strictly genetic in humans, son preference would not be well-nigh universal. (Ever wonder why sex ratios naturally hover around 50/50?)

As you note, one would predict son preference in the wealthy and powerful. But, with rare exception, humans express son preference up and down the status scale, and have been known to maintain it tenaciously even to the tragi-comic point where ostensibly rational and self-interested people drive their "gene spreading potential" smack into a brick wall at very high speed. (See, e.g., all those wifeless young men in areas of rural China.)

As you say, male offspring are high risk/big payoff investments, and, in nature as in the stock market, it is wiser for some players to stick with a conservative strategy. That they don't may not necessarily be explained by biology. I would guess there's a genetic ingredient somewhere in the stew, but - well, there's always simple human stupidity, rigidity, and lack of foresight to consider.

Abiola Lapite --

It's true, sons are a riskier investment than daughters. However, I think you overgeneralize from there. With financial instruments, higher risk generally translates to a higher expected return, and this is most assuredly not true in the case of the sex of offspring. Cloning aside, the total number of offspring produced by males will be equal to the number of offspring produced by females, so the expected return in both cases is equal. Sons are *not* high-risk, high-return investments, they are high-risk, *average* return investments. Your appraisal might hold water if sons of wealthy parents had a higher expected number of children than daughters of wealthy parents, which would necessarily imply that daughters of poor parents would have a higher expected number of children than sons of poor parents. This may well be true, but it is not self-evident, and I think it is quite unlikely, and requires arguing in any event.

Warning--the following post is a repeat of a superficially plausible but not well proven evolutionary psychology argument I read. (Although that's a bit redundant, isn't it? I could have just said it was a ev psych. argument.)

Anyway, the theory is that low class parents are better off having a girl for a couple of reasons. First, pretty much any woman can have babies--there's always some guy around willing to sleep with them. The same is not true of men. Second, women are judged much less on socioeconomic factors than men are. Women want to be with rich guys, men want to be with beuatiful women. So a rich man is likely to be much more successful in the mating arena than a poor man, while rich vs. poor women there is not such a difference.

The book (maybe The Red Queen?) said that some data did in fact show that poor families had more girls while rich ones had more boys (maybe 55 or 60% in each case), but I don't know how solid that research was.

Doug--

It is possible, of course. I generally don't think of lower-class men as lacking mating opportunirties, but this certainly doesn't count as research, either. It strikes me as something which would have been very likely to have been true 100 years ago, but perhaps not so much anymore.

On the other hand, in terms of the orginial issue, any preference of wealthy folk for male babies should be balanced by a preference of poor folk for female babies, which doesn't seem to actually happen.

Laura,
Be careful about assuming that what was true 100 years ago is not necessarily true today. Earth's tech level is not entirely uniform and in many places the conditions that obtained "back when" are just as true now. We also need to think twice about assuming that everybody was necessarily a raging "Origin of the Species" thumping Darwinist whose only purpose in life is to successfully minimax their genetic odds since Darwinism itself and Mendalian genetics did not really obtain until the late 19th Century. Biology *does* play a role but genetics has little to do with it.

For an somewhat oversimplified example of this let's look at the rural China area that Moira had alluded to. In China, as in most other traditional socities children are the only real form of Social Security that any parent is ever going to have. In such societies a wife's income and the fruits of her labor will go to the family she married into while a son's income and the fruits of his labor will go to the family he stays with. So basically the oldest son's role is to insure the immediate survival of his parents in their old age, subsequent sons are "backup" in case something dire happens to the oldest son or else are "extra hands for labor" depending upon one's circumstances and daughters are useful for making alliances with other families (The more powerful and wealthy an ally you can make the better). Once your immediate survival in old age is assured the more alliances you can strike the better. The younger sons are useful in this regard too since you can farm them out as apprentices, scribes, priests/monks or soldiers but to some extent those connections do lack the immediate punch of "Hi, our offspring and your offspring are making our grandkids together" that a *good* marriage alliance has (Since I'm trying to keep this simple I'll abstain from indicating the ways a marriage alliance can go bad! >_

But let's assume that some idiot Communist government comes along and tell you that you can only have *one* child: Would you select the supplemental value of family alliances to *your* immediate family and depend on the charity of your inlaws when you are no longer able to work or take care of yourself (Which is what a daughter represented) or would you rather rely on the guranteed support of your immediate offspring (which was what a son represented)? As it turned out most mothers were not any more enthused about the idea of starving to death in old age than most fathers were hence the current situation in China. The choice that the *people* had made in the first place was quite rational. The fault of the situation lays entirely with the "stupidity, rigidity, and lack of foresight" of the government that told them "One or the other!" at the point of a gun. ~_~

However, the fact that a sufficient number of the rural families chose "Option C, We'll break the law and have a 2nd child anyway!" (and did so in spite of all the Communists could and *did* do), in sufficient numbers that eventually the Party was force to yield and amend their "One Child Family Act" to allow rural families the legal right to a 2nd child would seem to indicate that there is indeed a strong desire in poor families to have daughters as well as sons. ^_^

- S.P.M.

Small Pink Mouse,

Of course. How silly of me. In my provinciality, I was thinking specifically of Anglophone cultures, and most specifically of the United States, in my last post, which is of course not the entire subject of the original post. In fact, there was a clear caveat that Western nations didn't fully conform to this sex preference. Further, I was giving only my impressions, not claiming hard evidence. From what I've actually seen and experienced, wealthier males don't have a markedly higher reproduction rate than wealthy females, and, conversely, poorer males don't seem to have any problem reproducing at at least the same rate as poorer females. Again, I may be wrong, but it's not self-evidently clear to me that wealthy males have more reproductive success than wealthy females (in 21st century Anglophone cultures).

Mothers have the most influence in the _family_ overall everywhere in reproduction matters no matter what anyone says. (although the male sperm determines the sex and changes with the balance of male/female. for instance during times of war, more girl babies are born. it's been conjectured that there is a knowing balance by nature between male and female.) A woman's control could be subtle, she might not act like she rules the roost as a father sometimes does in certain families and cultures. The government may even try to control the births in a family. Anyway, given this power, sadly, most mothers play favorites toward their sons and having sons, it's a sexual-social thing (they are often jealous of daughters, whether mildly from time to time or more, but often even jealous of the daughter father relationship in the family, especially if the daughter and father are close). That explains part of the 5% in the U.S., jealousy, insecurity (mostly culturally caused). As far as staying together and not divorcing, women are taught that a boy needs a father more than a daughter does, even though this is completely not true. (Girls need a strong caring father for self-esteem, because the mother tends to be too often hyper critical of unimportant things because of societally taught factors, female protection/brain factors, competition, etc.) Also, after a divorce, a divorced women does find more companionship or involvement (even if bickering) in a daughter than she does in a son and doesnt' seek to marry so soon. She also doesn't want to expose her daughter to another new man in the family by remarrying, whether through protection or through jealousy. A high majority of women like being the only female around when a man is in the picture, father or not... despite how much they won't admit this. It's because men will woof woof over what ever is prettiest that has a vagina, so if there is only one vagina around, then that vagina will get the attention. Women have to at least try to maintain control because they are the ones who get pregnant. It's like preprogrammed. This is just a sexual competition thing also. Women are taught to compete on looks, sexuality, social prowess. It's all wack, but true. More enlightened people try to see this and not fall into the brain washing and the preprogrammed machine nonsense. Anyway, women also have to control and manipulate to simply protect themselves because they are generally physically less strong. Men are taught to compete on technical or physical skill, careers, money. These roles are chaning, but not yet. They don't feel the need to protect themselves sexually from women (usually). Fathers aren't socialized to be as jealous of sons, even though some are, especially if the mother gives the sons more attention than the father. Fathers are taught by society and often times coached by the mother to see sons more as little versions of themselves and to take sexual pride in them more than women are taught to take sexual pride in their daughters. Soceity does control these attitudes more than most things, but there is a sexual holdover element. Women prefer boys out of jealous and sex-based feelings unless they are more enlightened and fair-minded females and less base. Women who are not so tied up in basing everything on sex are the best mothers. Anyway, like a female cat, if she has a litter of four girls and one male, she will always carry the male off first if there is a threat, because if need be, she can always later mate with the male son. Some men prefer girl offspring, these are the more jealous type men who don't want boy offspring or who don't have such a problem having intimate platonic realationships with females. They are most likely good friends with their wives and mothers and they tend not to be jealous or they are feminist and preach the value of having a girl just as having a boy and practice at not being jealous. Whether a couple or person wants a boy or girl, girls kinda get a raw deal in how they are coacched by the mother compared to how the mother treats the boy. Mothers always love their sons just a little more; they see them as less controlling, more sweet, more innocent. The mother sees the daughter as themselves adn they know women are more manipulating through necessity most of the time (not all of the time). Fathers would love their daughters just a little more as long as the mother doesn't interfere and point out the bad things about the daughter because of jealousy. It would be good if fathers could learn to be as protective over their daughters as mothers are over their sons, despite the mother's influence one way or the other. Strong fathers who are co-managers of the family are important and underrated. That's not to say that a father could ever take a mother's place. Note, there's nothing to say that a male-brianed female or a female-brained male couldn't take on either role, mother or father. There are all types of families. A child could also have three or four parents, as long as they are working togehter to nurture the child/children.

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