A lesson for China from Australian history?

 If ever there was a country less likely to provide useful lessons for China, it is Australia. Australia has always been underpopulated. It is practically the platonic ideal of a settler colony, having wiped out the locals far more thoroughly than its American counterparts. The settlers brought British institutions with them and then improved them: in humanity’s slow move towards democracy and the rule-of-law, Oz has always been on the forefront.

But there is one thing that past Australia shared with future China: a huge imbalance of men over women!

There has been a lot of blather about China’s sex-imbalance, most recently in the Washington Post. In the words of our co-blogger, Doug Muir: 

I’ve been reading variants of that article since well back in the Clinton administration. Is anyone aware of any hard evidence linking skewed sex ratios to a more aggressive foreign policy? Because AFAIK there is none, which makes these articles Just So stories justifying another round of yellow peril pearl-clutching.

I note that China’s oldest sex-skewed cohorts are in their thirties now. So far, the major effects seem to be a rise in prostitution and a lot more time spent on the internet. Both negative social consequences to be sure, but a long way from the Tong Wars and “virile” foreign policy these two dopes are going on about.

So what did an unbalanced sex ratio do in Australia? Well, Pauline Grosjean and Rose Khattar of the University of New South Wales decided to take a look! Their findings:

We document the implications of missing women in the short and long run. We exploit a natural historical experiment, which sent large numbers of male convicts and far fewer female convicts to Australia in the 18th and 19th century. In areas with higher gender imbalance, women historically married more, worked less, and were less likely to occupy high-rank occupations. Today, people living in those areas have more conservative attitudes towards women working and women are still less likely to have high-ranking occupations. We document the role of vertical cultural transmission and of homogamy in the marriage market in sustaining cultural persistence. Conservative gender norms may have been beneficial historically, but are no longer necessarily so. Historical gender imbalance is associated with an aggregate income loss estimated at $800 per year, per person. Our results are robust to a wide array of geographic, historical and present-day controls, including migration and state fixed effects, and to instrumenting the overall sex ratio by the sex ratio among convicts.

In other words, the historical evidence does not point to a future of gang warfare and foreign adventurism. Rather, China will be more traditional, more married, and slightly poorer than it would have been otherwise. And if the lessons from the West and Latin America hold, the result of that will also counterintuitively be a much lower birthrate than in more gender-equal countries.

China in 2050? A big giant Queensland! But with robots. 

This is not as sexy as a Venezuelan-style crime wave combined with an invasion of Siberia, or whatever. But it has the advantage of being grounded in this thing we historians call evidence. 

Comments

[shah8]

I think there are plenty enough SE Asian women available to be brides in a way never really true of Aussie men. Men who take such brides will be of lower social status and kids will be lower on the totem pole. This phenomenon ongoing in Korea is actually pretty fascinating with the various sorts of controversies and poignancies that have been occurring.

[shah8]

As far as crime waves and war-making goes...

I think one main thing is more subculture formation as men seek to be socially involved, whether that be gangs or model train hobbies. The other is the increased valuable thingafication (as noted in the paper cited in post) of women and their ability to reflect male success. More harems, absurd competition and negotiations with in-laws. Lots more taboos.

Traditionally when one chinese area gets a little light on women, they raid other villages and areas and kidnap women for brides (if I understand correctly). In megacities with more state presence, this is probably harder to do. However, we're talking about people on the bottom of the heap and relatively equal to one another. Australia might also have been a fairly egalitarian environment. In a class ridden society, think, oh, hey! India!, you may well get a lot of violence, particularly of socially dominant classes (with plenty of women), against working, minority, or poor men. The Chinese in 19th century America may also be a case in point. The inspired dysfunction causes general civil unrests and outright civil wars...

P.S. I hope your son isn't disparing of his future prospects! He looks like (take away baby fat and look at symmetry...) he should be handsome enough to bag a good partner!

[Noel Maurer]

He's just astounded at the silliness of the discussion. I have seen few better images to capture "oy vey" than that one.

Although this particular case involved leaving his soccer ball at the cafe. Point holds, I think.