21 Comments
Oct 16, 2022Liked by Policy Tensor

Very interesting as always. Just a couple of thoughts which may already have occurred to you anyway. You may want to split India north vs south as they have quite different family structures according to Todd with the south having the unique asymmetrical community family structure which is relatively feminist (preferred wife for a son is a daughter of the mother's brother) and polyandry in the extreme south. The female to male sex ratio in the south of the country is far higher than in the north.

Todd wrote a book called the Causes of Progress (in 1987, two years after the publication of the Explanation of Ideology) in which he attributed advances in social development to strong vertical discipline and the relative status of women via their impact on attitudes to education which he maintained was the true hallmark of all social progress. He predicted that by the late C21st Japan and Germany would be the global hegemons with the Anglo Saxon world, lacking in vertical discipline (though not in feminism), falling back somewhat. He's since rowed back on this position saying he was too influenced at the time by Freudian ideas about the importance of the mother in the social development, which were still dominant at the time. Todd no longer seems to view the status of women as a causal factor in social development on the same, fundamental level as the vertical and horizontal family / cultural dimensions of his main analytical framework. He seems to view the relative feminism of a society as being driven by the level of horizontal family ties with strong solidarity between males resulting in lower status of women through mediating practices such as endogamy and cultural traits such as chauvinism.

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Yes, will be testing his hypotheses in Causes of Progress, which I just read; including interstate variation within India, etc. I’ve reduced his causal model down to family structures --> feminism --> dynamism. That’s not an unfair simplification of his model. But will be testing his model directly. Bear with me please.

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Oct 17, 2022Liked by Policy Tensor

Absolutely. It will be very interesting to see where feminism sits on the spectrum between cause of dynamism and effect of family structure. (BTW Excellent article on the Ukraine last week. Very insightful and completely reframed the way I was thinking about the conflict).

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I realise to try and answer the most fundamental question in Economic History is a tall order but dude, have some humility and don’t try and come up with the one true answer in one blog post, as you have.

I’m an MSc in EH at the LSE. I’m being taught this very subject by the worlds experts. Not one believes that societal attitudes to women is the one theory to rule them all. It’s a theory and a factor yes. But no it doesn’t explain divergence.

Divergence began in the 16th C FYI. I can assure you woman’s rights in England and Holland in this century were no better then as they are in India today. Trust me.

I’ll point you in a direction you should follow that is a major factor, actually the major factor in both the Little Divergence and the Great Divergence. The Black Death. The outcome of which in England and Holland was not monotonic. Unlike the way it was literally everywhere else.

That’s a good starting point for you. Read Broadberry.

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I am not responsible for other people’s ignorance. And you’re wrong about the status of women in premodern northern and Western Europe. Check with your professors.

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🤣

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Oct 19, 2022Liked by Policy Tensor

'I can assure you woman’s rights in England and Holland in this century were no better then as they are in India today. Trust me.'

Nonsense. (Although if seen from today's perspective, which is not uncommon in contemporary, highly emotional academia, anything back then seems horribly unjust).

Speaking for the Dutch, 17th century foreign visitors from for instance southern European nations loathed the freedoms enjoyed and expressed vividly by Dutch women. (And wrote home about it. Maybe read more than Broadberry?). They took part in economic life and were very visible (and hearable) while doing so.

Pipe-smoking (sic) ladies selling goods in public in a period where southern 'decent' women were supposed to stay at home, similar to how many women in N African cultures are expected to behave...

The horror...

Foreigners could not understand the lack of 'shame' of the Dutch (and many still can't, for various topics).

And while women in paintings were up to the 17th century typically religious figures, Dutch painters began to portray regular women while the Dutch public bought these paintings by the millions.

The independence of Dutch women influenced US culture too:

'...the paradox of seventeenth-century Dutch women was that while their primary roles were wives and mothers, they exercised considerable independence within marriage. Owing to the commercial orientation of New Netherland, decision making by wives was important to the viability of New Netherland and New York economy in the seventeenth century...

...In a population drawn together in close proximity by geography, historically many wives were formally and informally involved in local commerce as shopkeepers, teachers, and occasional traders. As a consequence, young women were educated and trained early for a married life that involved commerce.

This work shows the behavior of women in New Netherland was governed by distinctive social, legal, and cultural expectations that governed the lives of Dutch women in the United Provinces of the Netherlands.'

https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2433&context=etd

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The East Asia claim is extremely dubious, and is not backed by various gender equality indexes out there, especially the component rich indexes. There are fewer women with university education there, fewer women in STEM, fewer women on company boards, worse family laws, etc. compared to let's say Latin America or Eastern Europe.

I recommend the WEF gender equality index which uses far more data points than the data poor article here, in order to estimate gender equality. On that index, East Asia is performing very bad on gender equality. Japan or China for example are beyond number 100 in the world.

Another issue with the article is that western countries are declining and losing their power, as the rest of the world is growing economically faster than them, increasing its share in the global economy, and is displacing them in importance.

The West being in a process of long term decline and losing its power does not fit well with the claims in the article.

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WEF, 2022: Figure 1.6 E Asia overal performs better than for insatnce LATAM looking at 'economic participation & opportunity.

That's an outcome, as a result from other components, that matters highly.

Read the E Asia segment and you'll find several advantages over othe regions explained.

https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2022/in-full/1-benchmarking-gender-gaps-2022#1-5-performance-by-region

'fewer women in STEM, fewer women on company boards'

So?

Dutch women perform terrible there too while they have all the possibilities ligned up for them. Yet they choose to work part time, and mostly not in STEM.

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Oct 19, 2022·edited Oct 19, 2022

Dear, its not East Asia, rather East Asia and Pacific, which includes countries such as Australia and New Zealand.

The average "economic participation & opportunity" of Japan, China and South Korea is 0,63, lower than Latam, Eastern Europe or Central Asia.

'fewer women on company boards, fewer women in STEM'

Who is ruling matters.

The STEM issue too contributes to "feminine" and "masculine" stereotypes in behavior and bigger pay gaps.

And yes, laws matter too, unlike in Argentina or in Bulgaria you have no problem beating your wife or girlfriend in East Asia, because it is extremely hard for a woman there to obtain a restraining order or get him out of the house. Very very few restraining orders ever get approved there. Not to mention that almost zero "restraining orders" in China involve actually kicking an abuser out of the house.

Culture matters too, for example the well known son preference culture in East Asia, there is no such thing in Eastern Europe and certainly less in Latam.

So yeah, you better start studying these issues in depth instead of wasting other people's time with dilettante "insights".

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The correlation between IQ and national wealth is far more significant than the status of women.

'Women in Politics' does not reflect the status of Chinese women. All political careers in China begin with 5 years in a God-forsaken, flyblown village, trying to raise local incomes by 50% (a task Xi Jinping accomplished by age 19). Success means promotion and transfer to another province–but not one's own. All grandmothers and mothers recommend that daughters avoid such a career, which pretty much makes marriage and children impossible. In the West, unqualified bullshitters like the ridiculous Baroness von Der Leyen, can rise to great heights.

Is the high status of European women reflected in assaults, rapes, and murders of EU women?

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Status of women may profoundly affect group 1 stunting rates and lock on inter-generational poverty and impaired cognitive function.

The mediators could be adolescent anaemia and, in pregnancy, maternal anaemia, lack of folate, lack of varied diet, more hours exposed to kitchen smoke, short maternal stature, GBV, absolute poverty.

Improvements can come from girls staying in education to age 18, cash transfers, integrated health systems, better agriculture/storage/food testing, and more.

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> This is consistent with Todd’s theory, which expects the “vertical” three generation family that prevails between Morocco and Bangladesh to be even less conducive to dynamism than the polygny structure of family arrangements in Sub-Saharan Africa.

I don't know when this survey was taken but the three generation household isn't a thing in Bangladesh any more. Even the average rural household is like around 4.5. So basically you, your spouse and your unmarried kids.

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Todd's talking about traditional family structures, not contemporary ones. With modernization the world world is moving, albeit at different speeds, towards the Western nuclear family pattern.

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"Israel does not belong in the Middle East. It has a status-of-women score in the same ballpark as the United States or France."

Hmm, again someone with poor knowledge about the world.

Do you know that there is bigger gender pay gap in Israel, fewer women in STEM, there is no "no fault divorce", a woman needs to obtain a permission ("get") from her husband in order to divorce, which is a well known problem, no alimony for former wives, a divorced wife can not legally marry her lover she cheated with (which matters, as due to strong social pressure almost all women try to marry), there are religious all male courts involved in handling divorce, cohabitation without marriage is very rare, only 5 % of children are born to unmarried women, and there is only small state support for people having children, compared to western countries.

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Oct 16, 2022·edited Oct 16, 2022

In China’s case, it is notable that so many Chinese women are being educated in US universities. India, as well. I would be interested in seeing a breakdown of the % of BRIC countries being represented at US universities, particularly the Ivys.

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This is so powerful and beautiful, Anusar. Thank you for sharing your brilliant work on this. I appreciate it more than you know 🙏♥️

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Oct 17, 2022Liked by Policy Tensor

Non-white world is coming to america to wear bikinis 🥳🥳

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Sir I can’t understand you I’m chilling at the beach 🏄

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