> Date:    Tue, 23 May 2006 15:13:54 -0500
> From:    Denys Beauchemin <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: OT: Labor market
>
> The one-child policy of China will be part of the undoing.  Another
> component is the fact people wanted male children and so China right now is
> short 100 million women.  You do the math.

More troubling for the world, I should think, is that the globe's two most
populous countries, China and India:

  1.  Both have horrendous male:female imbalances among the populations
currently in their reproductive years.

  2.  Both have extraordinary surpluses (100 million in China's case) of young
males who, statistically speaking, have no chance whatsoever of finding a
permanent mate.

  3.  Both are rapidly expanding their consumer economies, with a commensurate
growth in demand for raw materials, in particular, fossil fuels and
increasing dissatisfaction with the distribution of wealth and opportunity
within their societies.

  4.  Both share a common and disputed, albeit ruggedly inhospitable, border.

  5.  Both have very large, if technically underdeveloped, conventional
military forces.

  6.  Both have nuclear weapons.

  7.  Both border on other historical rivals, each of whom has its own
economic and political stability problems and who would likely be drawn into
any conflict between them; two of whom, Russia and Pakistan, also possess
nuclear weapons.

  8.  Both possess central authorities whose elites' power base largely rests
on arbitrary state violence and endemic public corruption.

Unattached males who have no compelling reason to value their future, and the
prospect of a life without a mate or the possibility of a family can hardly be
considered an appealing future for most humans, are notoriously socially
disruptive.

The prospect of two, massively large, socially dissatisfied, male dominated
cultures, possessing highly dysfunctional central civil authorities sharing a
common border and competing for increasingly scarce resources while possessing
nuclear weapons can hardly be cause for complacency on the part of the rest of
the world.  The politicized sexual issues that loom large for these societies,
and the potential for their women, already depreciated and largely
marginalized, to become viewed as mere social commodities, hardly bears
contemplating.  Interesting times indeed.

Sincerely,
Jim


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