Modernization and Westernization are not the same thing

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - 1:07 PM

I'm going to go out on a limb and state unequivocally that I think civil liberties and gender equality are Very Good Things. All else equal, I'd much rather live in a society in which freedom of speech is protected and women have all of the rights and opportunities afforded to men.

I bring this up because a common assumption that guides much of global economic policy is that as developing countries get richer, they will start valuing these qualities as well. There's a belief that regardless of the sequencing, political modernization will not trail too far behind economic modernization. Even in anomalous countries like Singapore, for example, there are trends suggesting that richer societies start demanding all those political and personal freedoms that many in the West take for granted. Crudely and simply put, a guiding assumption behind much Western policymaking (as well as many foes of the West writ large) is that modernization = Westernization.

I bring this up because China and India are, at the present moment, trying to prove this assumption is wrong. China has been getting very rich very fast, and yet the Chinese government seems more repressive than ever. So much for political liberties.

In some ways, India is even more troubling, as the New York Times' Jim Yardley report:

India's increasing wealth and improving literacy are apparently contributing to a national crisis of “missing girls,” with the number of sex-selective abortions up sharply among more affluent, educated families during the past two decades, according to a new study.

The study found the problem of sex-selective abortions of girls has spread steadily across India after once being confined largely to a handful of conservative northern states. Researchers also found that women from higher-income, better-educated families were far more likely than poorer women to abort a girl, especially during a second pregnancy if the firstborn was a girl....

The study, being published in the British medical journal The Lancet, is the latest evidence of India’s worsening imbalance in the ratio of boys to girls. The 2011 Indian census found 914 girls for every 1,000 boys among children 6 six or younger, the lowest ratio of girls since the country gained independence in 1947. The new study estimated that 4 million to 12 million selective abortions of girls have occurred in India in the past three decades....

Dr. Prabhat Jha, a lead author of the study, noted that the use of sex-selective abortions expanded throughout the country as the use of ultrasound equipment became more widespread. Typically, women from wealthier, better-educated families are more likely to undergo an ultrasound, Mr. Jha said, and researchers found that these families are far more likely to abort a girl if the firstborn is a daughter.

“This is really a phenomenon of the educated and the wealthy that we are seeing in India,” said Mr. Jha, director of the Center for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto.

Census data has already confirmed that the problem has accelerated since 2001. The 2011 census found about 7.1 million fewer girls than boys under the age of 6, compared with a gap of roughly 6 million girls a decade earlier (emphasis added).

The study can be accessed at The Lancet's website (registration required). In an accompanying commentary, S.V. Subramanian and Daniel Corsi explain exactly why this is so friggin' depressing:

The steady decline in the ratio is surprising, and counterintuitive, in view of India's progress in recent decades in improving the levels of female literacy and increases in income per person....

the value of the analysis by Jha and colleagues is mainly independent confirmation of two important aspects of the sex ratio in India that have been reported previously with different data. The first is that sex imbalance at birth seems to be particularly concentrated in households with high education and wealth. This pattern suggests that dominance of the son-preference norm is unlikely to be offset, at least in the short term, by socioeconomic development. Second is that the overall problem of sex imbalance seems to arise throughout India, including in Kerala, which has often been characterised as a model state for social development and gender equality. The problem of sex imbalance seems to be a function of socioeconomic status, not geography.

As India gets richer, this problem will only get worse.

Now, this might be one of those "it's always darhest before the dawn" kind of trends, in which after a certain wealth threshhold, trends will shift back towards a more classical liberal direction. Maybe. I don't know, and anyone else who tells you that they know is bulls**tting you. Based on this study, however, the question of whether China and India will ever embrace liberal political and cultural norms is not going to go away anytime soon.

What do you think?

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EXPLORE:GLOBALIZATION, CHINA, GENDER, GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY, INDIA, LIBERALISM

Clearly, Linda Hirshman does not read this blog. What a sexist.

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Tuesday, December 9, 2008 - 1:49 PM

Linda Hirshman has an op-ed in today's New York Times in which she warns that Barack Obama's stimulus plan should benefit both genders equally:

Mr. Obama compared his infrastructure plan to the Eisenhower-era construction of the Interstate System of highways. It brings back the Eisenhower era in a less appealing way as well: there are almost no women on this road to recovery. Back before the feminist revolution brought women into the workplace in unprecedented numbers, this would have been more understandable. But today, women constitute about 46 percent of the labor force. And as the current downturn has worsened, their traditionally lower unemployment rate has actually risen just as fast as men’s. A just economic stimulus plan must include jobs in fields like social work and teaching, where large numbers of women work (emphasis added).

There's a word to describe Hirshman's argument here. I think the word is "wrong," since it's based on a faulty premise:

Men are losing jobs at far greater rates than women as the industries they dominate, such as manufacturing, construction, and investment services, are hardest hit by the downturn. Some 1.1 million fewer men are working in the United States than there were a year ago, according to the Labor Department. By contrast, 12,000 more women are working. This gender gap is the product of both the nature of the current recession and the long-term shift in the US economy from making goods, traditionally the province of men, to providing services, in which women play much larger roles, economists said. For example, men account for 70 percent of workers in manufacturing, which shed more than 500,000 jobs over the past year. Healthcare, in which nearly 80 percent of the workers are women, added more than 400,000 jobs. “As the recession broadens, the gap between men and women is going to close somewhat,” said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. “But right now, the sectors that are really getting pounded are intensely male.”

Click here for more background information on the data provided above. Now, maybe this is unfair -- maybe more women have entered the labor force, and therefore their unemployment rate has risen as fast as men. Nope, that's not it. Monthly data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Hirschman's assumpton is a flat-out falsehood. Immediately prior to the start of the recession (November 2007), the unemployment rate for men was 4.7%; the rate for women was 4.6%. As of November 2008, the unemployment rate for men has increased to 7.2%, while the unemployment rate for women has only risen to 6%. So, to sum up: there is no way to spin this data to support the assumption that drives Hirschman's op-ed. Readers are invited to proffer their reasons for a) how Hirshman could be so wrong in her premise; and b) why the New York Times op-ed page did not fact-check this out of the essay. UPDATE: Hirshman provides her rationale for this assumption in a comment over at Megan McArdle's site:

Here is the data from the November report of the BLS, available to anyone with a click of the mouse, showing the female unemployment rate rising as the downturn worsened, and, coincidentally, the jobs stimulus rose to the top of the political pile as the salient issue. Since extracting information from printed sources does not seem to be your strong suit, allow me to summarize the data: From October to November 2008, men's and women's unemployment rate rose .2. From September, 2008 to November, 2008, which was when the downturn worsened, men's unemployment rate rose .4 and women's .6.

This is, at best, cherry-picking the data, because it ignores the massive gender splits of the eight months of the recession prior to September. If the recession started in December of last year, I don't see a reason for looking only at a couple of months of data. ANOTHER UPDATE: Hirshman posts another comment below, which is essentially a reprint of what she wrote at McArdle's site. My response:

I misspelled her name in the initial version of this post. And my apologies for that.
Again, her focus on this quarter's data misses the point that this recession has hit men far harder than women. Looking only at recent data without examining the whole of recession is like looking only at the gender breakdown of the last lifeboat off of the Titanic.
Hirshman asks, "why is it that making an argument for women elicits this level of vitriol?" I don't find much vitriol in this post. I would counter with the question of why Hirshman -- someone who is hardly new to the public sphere -- is so sensitive to valid criticisms.
Stepping back, there's a larger question, which is whether the stimulus package should take gender into account. To me, that's the wrong question. The right question is, how can the stimulus be apportioned to maximize productivity and employment gains?

COMMENTS (28)

EXPLORE:CULTURE, ECONOMICS, GENDER, UNEMPLOYMENT

I'd like my gender bailout now, please

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Friday, December 5, 2008 - 1:48 PM

I think it would be safe to describe the November job report as "not good."

Nonfarm payroll employment fell sharply (-533,000) in November, and the unemployment rate rose from 6.5 to 6.7 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. November's drop in payroll employment followed declines of 403,000 in September and 320,000 in October, as revised. Job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors in November.

Since every other sector of the economy is asking for federal assistance, I'm wondering if this Boston Globe story by Robert Gavin will prompt the male gender to ask for special assistance:

Men are losing jobs at far greater rates than women as the industries they dominate, such as manufacturing, construction, and investment services, are hardest hit by the downturn. Some 1.1 million fewer men are working in the United States than there were a year ago, according to the Labor Department. By contrast, 12,000 more women are working. This gender gap is the product of both the nature of the current recession and the long-term shift in the US economy from making goods, traditionally the province of men, to providing services, in which women play much larger roles, economists said. For example, men account for 70 percent of workers in manufacturing, which shed more than 500,000 jobs over the past year. Healthcare, in which nearly 80 percent of the workers are women, added more than 400,000 jobs. "As the recession broadens, the gap between men and women is going to close somewhat," said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. "But right now, the sectors that are really getting pounded are intensely male." The divide is far starker than it was in last recession, when the technology crash battered professional and technical sectors in which women now hold more than 40 percent of jobs. From the beginning of 2001 to the beginning of 2002, the number of employed men declined by about 900,000, while the population of women with jobs fell by about 700,000.

In semi-seriousness, one wonders if this kind of gender breakdown will lead to a skew in infrastructure spending towards male-dominated industries (like road construction) rather than female-friendly infrastructure sectors (like, say, expanding broadband capabilities or boosting education spending).

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EXPLORE:ECONOMICS, POLITICS, FINANCIAL, GENDER