18 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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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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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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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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"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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