Ten Oh No! It’s a Girl! - More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics by Steven E. Landsburg - #femminucceedivorzi #statusenutrimentocorporeo #whoiswhoemaschietti #nipotame #stressfemminuccegermaniaest #ilmaschietotirisposa #patrignipredatori #figliunicimaschi #ipiùrichiestinelleadozioni #splittingnelleredità #autostimaneifigliedivorzio #
All over the world, boys hold marriages together, and girls break them up. An American with one daughter is nearly 5 percent more likely to divorce than an American with one son. The more daughters, the bigger the effect: the parents of three girls are almost 10 percent more likely to divorceRead more at location 1761
Economists Gordon Dahl and Enrico Moretti gathered these numbers from over three million census observations.Read more at location 1765
So in this case correlation really does imply causation—unless I’m wrong about gender being random. But why would it not be? Why should unhappily married people have a disproportionate number of girls? Well, maybe some third factor simultaneously affects the happiness of your marriage and the gender of your children.Read more at location 1775
people listed in Who’s Who have, collectively, about 15 percent more sons than daughters. (For the latter statistic, I rely on the testimony of the biologist Robin Baker in his book Sperm Wars.)Read more at location 1779
Why do high-status parents have more sons? Presumably because high-status sons can give you lots of grandchildrenRead more at location 1781
On the other side, low-status boys die childless more often than low-status girls.Read more at location 1783
So if you want a lot of grandchildren (and whether you want them or not, your genes do), you’ll want sons if you’re near the top of the status heap, but daughters if you’re near the bottom.Read more at location 1785
Now: what’s the mechanism to accomplish all this? One suggestion from the biologists—and one that makes good sense to an economist—is that a pregnant woman’s body, in deciding how much to invest in nourishing the embryo, takes account of the parents’ status and the embryo’s sex. High-status mothers give more nourishment to male embryos; low-status mothers give more nourishment to female embryos; better-nourished embryos are more likely to be born alive.Read more at location 1787
Can the involuntary process of nourishing an embryo respond to conscious information about status? Sure; this kind of thing happens all the time. Sweating with fear is an involuntary process, and it’s easily triggered by conscious awareness of an approaching tiger.Read more at location 1790
If high-status parents are also more likely to stay married, then perhaps we have a new explanation for the divorce statistics.Read more at location 1794
Another candidate for a “third factor” is stress. In many animal species, stressed populations produce unusually more female offspring.Read more at location 1796
In East Germany, during the traumatic years after the fall of Communism and the difficult transition to a market economy, unemployment reached historic highs, and so did the ratio of female births.Read more at location 1797
If stress and status can’t explain the numbers, we’re back where we began: daughters really do cause divorce.Read more at location 1809
Children of divorce usually stay with the mother, so the question comes down to this: why do fathers stick around for sons when they won’t stick around for daughters? (Or, alternatively, why do mothers stay married so their sons can have a father when they won’t do the same for their daughters?)Read more at location 1816
Dahl and Moretti believe that boys hold marriages together because parents prefer boys.Read more at location 1820
Of course we all know the answer in China, with its ongoing history of female infanticide.Read more at location 1822
divorced women with girls are substantially less likely to remarry than divorced women with boys.Read more at location 1823
Or maybe not. Maybe it just tells us that mothers prefer not to expose their daughters to a potentially predatory stepfather.Read more at location 1826
Take a typical unmarried couple who are expecting a child. Suppose they have an ultrasound, which more often than not reveals the child’s sex. It turns out that those couples are more likely to get married if the child is a boy.Read more at location 1828
Finally, Dahl and Moretti observe that parents of girls are quite a bit more likely to try for another child than parents of boys,Read more at location 1831
Although they don’t mention it, there’s one more bit of evidence to support the Dahl-Moretti “parents prefer boys” hypothesis: adoption agencies almost uniformly report a higher demand for girls.Read more at location 1835
Todd Peters: boys with low self-esteem become withdrawn and unattractive; girls with low self-esteem become promiscuous. So, if you want lots of grandchildren, you’ve got to raise the self-esteem of your sons (by staying married) and lower the self-esteem of your daughters (by getting divorced).Read more at location 1846
parents could well believe that boys, more than girls, need big inheritances—either because wealth gives boys a bigger advantage in the mating competition, or because boys are more likely to do something entrepreneurial.Read more at location 1848
This theory not only explains the divorce statistics, it also explains why parents of boys are less likely to try for another child:Read more at location 1851
If that’s correct, then a better title for this chapter might have been “Oh No! It’s a Boy!”
