| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"stoney" |
| Date: |
25 May 2005 09:35:56 AM |
| Object: |
OT: The Search for 100 Million Missing Women |
http://slate.msn.com/id/2119402/
the dismal science
The Search for 100 Million Missing Women
An economics detective story.
By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt
Posted Tuesday, May 24, 2005, at 3:42 AM PT
What is economics, anyway? It's not so much a subject matter as a sort
of tool kit—one that, when set loose on a thicket of information, can
determine the effect of any given factor. "The economy" is the thicket
that concerns jobs and real estate and banking and investment. But the
economist's tool kit can just as easily be put to more creative use.
Consider, for instance, an incendiary argument made by the economist
Amartya Sen in 1990. In an essay in the New York Review of Books, Sen
claimed that there were some 100 million "missing women" in Asia.
While the ratio of men to women in the West was nearly even, in
countries like China, India, and Pakistan, there were far more men
than women. Sen charged these cultures with gravely mistreating their
young girls—perhaps by starving their daughters at the expense of
their sons or not taking the girls to doctors when they should have.
Although Sen didn't say so, there were other sinister possibilities.
Were the missing women a result of selective abortions? Female
infanticide? A forced export of prostitutes?
Sen had used the measurement tools of economics to uncover a jarring
mystery and to accuse a culprit—misogyny. But now another economist
has reached a startlingly different conclusion. Emily Oster is an
economics graduate student at Harvard who started running regression
analyses when she was 10 (both her parents are economists) and is
particularly interested in studying disease. She first learned of the
"missing women" theory while she was an undergraduate. Then one day
last summer, while doing some poolside reading in Las Vegas—the book
was Baruch Blumberg's Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus—she
discovered a strange fact. In a series of small-scale medical studies
in Greece, Greenland, and elsewhere, researchers had found that a
pregnant woman with hepatitis B is far more likely to have a baby boy
than a baby girl. It wasn't clear why—it may be that a female fetus is
more likely to be miscarried when exposed to the virus.
Oster was suitably intrigued. She set out first to see if she could
use data to confirm Blumberg's thesis. A vaccine for hepatitis B, she
learned, had been available since the late 1970s. She found good data
on a U.S. government vaccination program in Alaska. Before the
vaccinations began, Alaskan natives had a historically high incidence
of hepatitis B as well as a high birth ratio of boys to girls. White
Alaskans, meanwhile, had a low incidence of hepatitis B and gave birth
to the standard ratio of boys to girls. But after a universal
vaccination program was carried out in Alaska, the Native Alaskans'
boy-girl ratio fell almost immediately to the normal range, while the
white Alaskans' ratio was unchanged. A vaccination program in Taiwan
revealed similar results.
Convinced now of the relationship between hepatitis B and birth
gender, Oster set out on a vast data mission to determine the
magnitude of that relationship. She measured the incidence of
hepatitis B in the populations of China, India, Pakistan, Egypt,
Bangladesh, and other countries where mothers gave birth to an
unnaturally high number of boys. Sure enough, the regions with the
most hepatitis B were the regions with the most "missing" women.
Except the women weren't really missing at all, for they had never
been born.
If you believe Oster's numbers—and as they are presented in a
soon-to-be-published paper, they are extremely compelling—then her
detective work has established the fate of roughly 50 million of
Amartya Sen's missing women. Her discovery hardly means that Sen was
wrong to cry misogyny, at least in some parts of the world: While
Oster found, for instance, that Hepatitis B can account for roughly 75
percent of the missing women in China, it can account for less than 20
percent of the boy-girl gap in Sen's native India. The culprits behind
the disappearance of the 50 million women whom Oster did not find are
likely the horrible ones that Sen and others have suggested. But
Oster's analysis does show that economics is particularly useful for
challenging a received wisdom—in this case, one that was originally
put forth by another economist.
The key to Oster's research was the availability of large and reliable
sets of data. This is an advantage in economics that is not always
conferred on the other social sciences. Consider now a different piece
of groundbreaking research in developmental psychology.
In the early 1980s, a group of psychologists and linguists banded
together to write Narratives From the Crib, a study of how children
acquire linguistic skills. Narratives was built around the speech
patterns of one child, a 2-year-old girl. Her parents had noticed that
she often talked to herself in the crib after they said good night and
left her room. They were curious to know what she was saying, so they
began to record her chatter. They turned on the tape recorder while
they were tucking her in and then left it running. Eventually they
gave the tapes to a psychologist friend, who shared it with her
colleagues. The big surprise to these experts was that the girl's
speech was far more sophisticated when she was alone than when she was
speaking with her parents. This finding, as Malcolm Gladwell would
later write in The Tipping Point, "was critical in changing the views
of many child experts."
The 2-year-old girl in question was referred to as Baby Emily. Her
full name? Emily Oster. In retrospect, it would appear that Narratives
From the Crib suffers what researchers call an "n of 1" problem, with
"n" representing the size of the sample set—a problem that is gravely
exacerbated when the one subject turns out to be … well, a good bit
brighter than average. Studying how children learn to talk by
observing Baby Emily may be a bit like studying how children learn to
play golf by studying Tiger Woods. Now that she's an economist, Emily
Oster has at least assured herself that she will never contribute to
another "n of 1" problem. The challenge in her field—and so far she
has met it well—is quite the opposite: to take a mass of disparate
numbers and somehow wring from it one thing that is true.
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner are the authors of
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of
Everything.
©2005 Slate
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned
by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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