“Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbours’ garden.”

Stupidity is self-reinforcing. The more you do a stupid thing, the more "normal" and "rational" it looks. It also becomes harder to discern the pattern of cause and effect. Take the infamous gender gap in China as an example. It's easy to blame such things on China's one-child policy, enacted to get a handle of their massive population.

The problem is, apparently, that's only a mitigating factor. A culture in which daughters (and their husbands) are seen having no social or fiscal responsibility to their parents makes girls a financial liability. That's a disaster to peasant families living on the edge.

And because this stupidity is seen as the natural way of things, it persists when families rise out of poverty. According to the same article in The Economist:

So modernisation and rising incomes make it easier and more desirable to select the sex of your children. And on top of that smaller families combine with greater wealth to reinforce the imperative to produce a son. When families are large, at least one male child will doubtless come along to maintain the family line. But if you have only one or two children, the birth of a daughter may be at a son’s expense. So, with rising incomes and falling fertility, more and more people live in the smaller, richer families that are under the most pressure to produce a son.

The only cure for such stupidity is changing the attitudes that perpetuate it. The article gives us a glimmer of hope at the end, pointing out how the trend seems to have reversed itself in South Korea, and the discrepancies have plateaued in China and India. So hopefully things are turning around.

But in the meantime, Asia has a surplus of guys, and it's not going to be easy to live with. The same culture that values boys over girls also attaches status to marriage and raising a family. (Yes, I know that doesn't make sense. That's my point.)

So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.

Let that sink in. Society flourishes largely on the eagerness of young men to produce surpluses of wealth with which they attempt to attract mates. Among humans, it's our chief version of bright plumage. The trend is well known from past societies that have faced such discrepancies: as these men reach young adulthood, they compete fiercely for the women available. But as it becomes clear to the losers that they are not going to win a wife, they drop out. Crime rises, productivity drops, unrest and anti-social behavior of all sorts (but especially the kidnap and rape of women) shoots up. According to this article, China and India may have already reached, or even passed, this cusp.

Medieval Europe solved a similar problem by starting the Crusades. They shipped their excess young men to the Middle East to die or win new lands and brides there. The historical model, in short, does not predict a stable, peaceful Asia in this century.

Photos by lanchongzi and Tony the Misfit.