I was impressed with this proposal. It offered a way of negotiating international economic necessities in an exciting way. It mirrors some of the education policy of East-Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong); massive investment in education early in the countries' development in the 50's and 60's. Imagine the return we would get on that investment today. What would a similar investment made by the U.S. look like in Mexico 20 years from now?

How would this proposal be sold to voters? Would it even need to be sold?

If supply and demand really works, then the remaining women in China and India will have more value, and thus more power to demand and receive benefits, for example, requiring that the man live with the woman's family, rather than the other way around. Too bad about all those single guys not getting laid (hey, maybe prostitute wages will rise!), but this will be a great thing for Chinese and Indian women in the long run.

So the entire populations of Africa, most of the Middle East, as well as parts of Central America, Haiti, Laos, and Cambodia don't amount to enough people to constitute a "Group" for our writer?



He posits: the shrinkers (under 2.1 children per woman), the stable (about 2.1) and a weird group of countries with sex ratio imbalances, most of which have low or medium rates of birth.



Where is the rest of the world, here?



What about the still-large group of mostly-Muslim countries which continue to have exploding populations?



The average African woman has 5.1 children. That's a number high enough to send the population of that continent soaring -- doubling and tripling in a few decades. It will also send them sailing -- on rafts, leaky boats and lashed-together piles of floating trash -- toward Spain's Canary Islands or the coasts of Italy.



The average family size in Niger is 8 children per woman. Yemen: 7.0. Afghanistan: 6.8. Palestine: 5.7. Sudan: 5.4. Somalia: 7.1. Angola: 6.8. Haiti: 4.7. Saudi Arabia: 4.8.



Any of these rates will cause rapidly expanding populations, AIDS or not.



Unemployment and underemployment are rampant. Environments are being stripped of trees and water is already inadequate. Asylum seekers struggle to escape. Starvation is worse than ever in places like Niger, Sudan, Rwanda and Chad, yet evokes a meagre charitable response, because the rich realize that feeding is likely to mean only that more mouths will soon arrive. Wars over scarce arable land and water kill and displace millions.



Humans are at each others’ throats in a struggle to survive.



Most of the countries which have these high rates of population growth are Muslim, poor, misogynist, under the heel of harsh authoritarian regimes, suffering from high unemployment, economically backward, open to the appeals of religious extremists and DANGEROUS.



High levels of youth unemployment are better predictors of terrorist activity, civil unrest and war than imbalanced male-female ratios. Most of those imbalances will be diluted due to the fact that the very birth control which leads to them also enriches the populations, allowing them to import brides from poorer areas, anyway.



The high dependency ratio caused by population graying is completely counterbalanced by the lower dependency ratio which results from there being fewer dependent children.



The dependency ratio falls sharply due to birth control, initially; this causes an economic boom. Then, 50 years later, greying causes the dependency ratio to rise somewhat, but never back to the undesirably high levels that high birth rates cause.



I think the writer has completely missed the biggest "biopolitics" story of the decade: the high and rising unemployment rates fed by high birth rates and stifled economies of many Muslim countries and the link between those high youth unemployment rates and terrorism.



I’d like to see a regression of the rate of terrorist attacks by a group of nationals and the gap between the marriage age of women and men among that nationality. That gap is a very good proxy for oppression of women.



I bet it would fit like a glove.



Or, let’s look at youth unemployment and terrorism. I’ll bet we see another good fit.



That’s the big story. Not ENOUGH reproductive choice, not a too much of it, as this writer seems to be trying to say.



Jan VanDenBerg

I'm missing something here. What's the need for a grand "bargain" and so on, what's happening today is exactly what you describe : capital from the US is already being invested in China and India. Short of expropriation, the dividends will flow back here.

Sounds like the authors are too afraid to offend any one group in particular, so the article ends up turgid and all over the place. Don't want to offend the Europeans by pointing out that their rigid statism and socialism is a disaster, so you have to balance it by saying Americans have no safety net. Don't want to offend Muslims, so you have to talk about Hindu terrorism, though that's a hypothetical danger rather than a proven one.



I re-read the article, trying to find any genuine insights. The imbalance of 100 million (even if true) out of the population of China, India and a few other countries : that's

By the way, the Iraq "adventure" was money well spent, even if it was taken out of investment flows that would otherwise have gone to developing countries. Never underestimate the power of a dangerous ideology

The proposal is impractical. There is no way on Earth these countries would ever live up to the back end of the contract 25 years hence. Expect massive amnesia on the part of governments when it comes to settling debts incurred by a different generation of political leaders. India would welcome the schools now, but there is zero chance that it would, a generation later, transfer billions to the European Union.

I became interested in gender imbalance in the developing world a number of years ago when I happened across a study (doctoral thesis, I believe) of female infanticide in China. The authors concluded that the rate of female infanticide indeed had decreased. They, however, attributed that decrease not to enlightened policy, but to the availability of fetal sex determination technology. It seems that doctors in even the most backwater of outposts have the ability to perform amniocentesis. Female babies are not left to die because they aren't being born. Subsequent research into male:female ratio demographics led me to many of Professor Purdy's conclusions. A world in which there is a dearth of female companionship is not a world we want.



However, Prof. Purdy's solution seems specious. First, there would be no guarantee that India and China would actually spend that "investment" on education, public health and infrastructure. In China particularly there would be no reliable way to verify that those monies were being spent as agreed.



Second, it's highly debatable whether "such investments would help women in developing countries push back against their increasingly male-dominated societies". The Chinese and Indians are in this fix in the first place precisely because they hold females in such low esteem. Besides, who's to say that even empowered females would want to bear and raise female children? And anyway, there's no real evidence that "women’s empowerment is good for democracy". It may be good for women, but good for democracy or society in general? There's much to suggest just the opposite.



But the biggest reason to question the wisdom of the Professor's solution is that there can be no guarantee that India and especially China would hold up the back end of the deal. I can well imagine China, having developed into an economic and military colossus, leaving the West to collapse under the weight of its own ill-considered social policies.



Instead of concocting pie-in-the-sky schemes like this, Prof Purdy should direct his talents to devising ways to reform entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare which in their present configurations are impossible to sustain.

Typical neo-liberal propaganda. There is not a word about global inequity caused by western powers and the devastating effects of centuries of western plunder and oppression continued today by the IMF / World Bank / WTO.

And to the (presumably) American posters who doubt India / China keeping up their end of a bargain: You only have to read your history to know that your supposedly "superior" Judeo-Christian American Congress broke EVERY treaty it ever signed with the Native Americans. The white man is not exactly reputed for keeping his end of any bargain, historically! So the Indians / Chinese would be just as skeptical, I assure you.

While the "author is clueless" response is full of hyperbole and vitriolic language, the essence of it holds true. The power imbalance currently present in international politics makes Jebediah Purdy's solution unlikely and dangerous.



The most reasonable comparison-which the author fails to cite due to the problems it would introduce to his argument-is the current economic agreement between the U.S, Canada, and Mexico. NAFTA represents the dangers of neo-liberal economic policy that promises to deliver benefits to all of its participants. While the wealthy persons in Mexico, America, and Canada benefit from increased economic freedoms across borders, the working classes of all three continue to suffer from outsourcing, relocation, and what has been termed the "race to the bottom."



How do we ensure that Jebedi'a Purdy's suggestion don't result in similarly stilted agreements that superficially guarantee a payoff to all concerned parties? You can't. The elimination of realpolitik and national self-interest requires guarantees that the current international system cannot guarantee. The feeble United Nations doesn't constitute an adequate control mechanism that would ensure full faith and credit of any international bargains.



Purdy's creative plan requires a reform of international power relations that would require a redefinition of political communities. What is required is a redefinition of nations that would create a new global community. Perhaps the crises that currently face us all-terrorism increasingly clear ecological collapse, etc-will trigger such a redefinition.

Purdy has posted a perfectly interesting, speculative approach that cannot be dismissed by shoot from the hip commentators. Shame on the lot of you!



However, it is impossible to evaluate his adaptation of Shiller's ideas without seeing Shiller's papers. Unfortunately, going to Shiller's own website, it is not at all obvious what papers Purdy was thinking from.



References please!