Today Maynard is asking an interesting demographic question:
there is another aspect to the demographics of India and China that I've not seen you mention---the overhang of boys vs girls. I have a pet theory that as these boys grow up and can't find girlfriends we are going to see much more militarily aggressive stances from these countries. The boys will be eager to go into war on the theory that this will prove them to be men and make them more desirable to the babes and (heck, whisper it, remove some of their competition). China has the potential to keep this under control, meaning they simply have a pool of disgruntled young men vandalizing and perhaps being locked up in prison. But India, a democracy with all the lunatic passions that go along with that; and with Pakistan always there. I think this is simply one more good reason why we'll see another fight break out; only a reason not often mentioned.
I don't know if Maynard was aware of it but Richard Wrangham made a very similar type of point in his Edge interview (see below). On India more generally, my guess is that the US will try to use India as a buffer in the face of a growing perceived (or real) problem with China. I mean its the only thing that's b Iig enough. Every one things about Pakistan/India, normally when everyone is thinking something they're wrong. Remember India has had a war and long standing dispute with China.
China is coming up so fast that it's amazing even me. One of the points about things getting faster faster is that this has a strange effect on our concept of the future. I can still remember that in the seventees we used to talk about the eightees as if they were just around the corner. Now 2010 seems on the one hand quite near, and on the other very, very far away. If we follow a Kurweil type calculus we could see (to say something) 2 centuries of change (measured in past time) between now and 2010. What I'm trying to say is that we have no idea what the relative economic strengths and weaknesses of the US and China will be come 2010 (Europe I imagine will be completely out of the game and obsessed with its own problems), but the threat of military confrontation for hegemony must exist.
I would say this is the one which preoccupies me most. The one which gets me wakeing-up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat: just how will Washington respond the day Beijing announces 'tommorrow we're off to Taiwan'? Why, for example, were the Beijing politicians so keen to get chip manufacturing moved to the mainland, and why were they so 'anti' in Washington. And whatever happened to that 'spy plane downed' issue. It's funny, this took place about the time Stephen Roach was on one of his annual visits to Beijing. He even got to meet the then Premier. It was also about the time he really got going spelling out bubblenomics and the double dip. The Premier thanked him profusely and Steve was very flattered. One week later the plane was brought down. Now it couldn't be that they were grateful to him for explaining that the US was weakening economically, and that it might be a good time to push a bit, now could it? As usual people are thinking about the wrong story. (I'm not referring to Stephen Roach here, but to our general collective obsessions).
We tend to think of the problems that have given rise to Al Qaeda, for example, as being concerned primarily with economic and political conflict, and obviously those are hugely important. Nevertheless, in order to understand why it is that particular countries and particular people within those countries find Osama bin Laden's wild schemes attractive, we have to think in terms of rather deeper differences among groups and sexes.
Think of it this way: Why is it that Western civilization is threatening to the people who support the Al Qaeda philosophy? And not just the Al Qaeda fighters themselves, but more importantly the great masses who are buying the Al Qaeda t-shirts in the Middle East? It's true that U.S. hegemony over oil and support for Israel in the Palestine conflict are general economic inequities that are going to contribute to people's resentment, but there are reasons why those men in particular resent Westernization.
Men in the Middle East come from a society in which there is polygany — one man having many wives — and even though polygany can never be very wide-spread within a society because there aren't enough women, it has the enormous effect that women marry upwards. Polyganous marriages are always concentrated in the upper socio-economic strata. This means that in the lower socio-economic strata you have a lot of men with very few women, and they use the typical systems for getting wives that are used in polyganous societies, which include gaining control over women. In a polyganous society, women want to marry into the polyganous society because that's where all the wealth and the opportunities are to get good food and survival opportunities for your kids. Consequently, they allow themselves to be frustrated, to be veiled and put in the burkha, to be given rules that mean they can only stay inside the house and have to blacken their windows. They allow themselves to be totally controlled by men.
So in this society you've got a lot of lower-class men, who have very few reproductive opportunities, who want to control women, and then you introduce them to this westernization that says, "Women, we will educate you, we will free you from the burkha, we will give you opportunities to be mobile, to travel, to flirt, to make your own romantic alliances." That is a very strong threat to the men who are already up against it and whose reproductive future depends on making alliances with other men who are in complete control of their own daughters. So westernization undermines reproductive strategies of men who are already desperate.
This means that in order to develop long-term strategies for reducing the degree of resentment that globalization and westernization are inducing in those countries, we should think about what we can do to reduce polygany. The countries where Al Qaeda gets the most support are the most polyganous countries: the Afghanistans, the Pakistans, the Saudi Arabias, and so on. But if you take a country like Turkey, which banned polygany in the 1920s, you see very little support. Single men are dangerous when they face a difficult reproductive future, and when they are presented with a series of economic changes that further reduce their economic futures by liberating women from their own control, then those men become peculiarly open to those wild schemes that Osama bin Laden presents. And those sorts of dangers are liable simply to continue for as long as the reproductive inequities continue in the Middle East.
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