I’m sorry, this is plain idiotic. If a person runs around having pictures of themselves taken while wearing next to nothing, they deserve whatever comments the blogosphere makes about them. I’m not a supermodel, but I’m putting myself out there like her.

At the risk of starting an even bigger derail . . . what exactly is the joke here? Yeah, yeah, beaver = vag, I get it. But the double entendre talk of “attacking” a woman’s “beaver”? That sounds more like a reference to sexual assault than anything else to me. Is there some other way I was supposed to read this?

Female literacy and length of education, are the decisive variables – imo. these of course will inevtiably change “the culture” as such. States can’t directly assault cultural norms without changing the legal system, provision of public services and distribution of assets – all of which will have a large impact. For the regions of India affected with a marked adverse ratio; changing the legal inheritance systems and enforcing land ownership for women will have a role but in areas where agricultural operations can’t all be done by women (usually where it is undertaken by OBCs and ‘upper caste Hindus’) this may be difficult.

And I say again, a state or city level analysis to control for income and education just isn’t going to work. Those sorts of decisions are made at the household level and unless you can come up with a household level survey that can get you a reliable count on foeticide or female infanticide you are not going to accurately capture the effect of any of your control variables. Just because an area has more money and more educated people doesn’t mean every individual in the area does and it doesn’t mean that people who are nominally rich relative to the countryside are going to be rich relative to their neighbors or richer in terms

The data is at the district level and can be matched with NSS data on incomes; what you say is true but there is a disturbing correlation between those districts which have experienced rising incomes but declining JSRs (Juvenile Sex ratios). One has to explain why richer states like Punjab and Haryana have this problem relativelt to poorer states like Orissa and Bihar and why within these states richer districts have worse indicators than rich ones. Of course correlation doesn’t mean causality as we all know but there is an underlying trend that needs to be examined here.

The disagregated data that we do have at the household level is by religion and social caste. Hence one can observe that Hindus and Sikhs have a much worse and declining ratio than Muslims and other minorities like Christians and that upper caste and OBCs have a worse and declining ratio vis-a-vis Dalits/adivasis. Why this is the case is debatable; certainly it seems counter-intuitive since those groups with the worst educational attainment and lowest income levels have the most balanced JSRs – adivasis. IMO and that of some demographers like Monica Das Gupta who had an excellent article on this in the JDS a couple of years back; kinship systems that were not virilocal and inheritance systems that were more equitable towards women; as well as factors like womens’ ability to undertake agricultural operations usually reserved for men such as ploughing; in these communities played an important role. But of course a lot more work needs to be done on this and these are tentative conclusions. The problem is that there is a lot of regional and social variation; so in-depth studies like those on Bijnor etc. will be of limited use to generalise any conclusions from.

I don’t accept that ‘rational public’ is a valid way to analyse societies at a macro-level. These kinds of assumptions always assume that the interests of the ‘public’ are essentially singular when in reality such categories are made up of different groups that have conflicitng aims and desires. As a proscriptive framework for public policy though, it seems reasonable.

Actually I’m a bigger fan of “rational public” theory. Essentially individual people can behave “irrationally,” but the combination of reading the statements of respected intellectuals, cultural norms, and legal restrictions push society so that the average for society ends up moving in a rational direction. Ideally, the cultural norms are supposed to be set up to help people make decisions more easily that maximize their own well-being and the “social good” and economic constraints are going to have an effect on that. For example, high infant mortality means you place a lower value on the lives of infants and, consequentially, don’t even bother doing a naming ceremony until at least a few months in. Lower value of life combined with other social and economic costs and it is not hard to see why kids get abandoned. Fixing it isn’t a matter of a marketing blitz or willful attempts to change the “culture.” Better access to healthcare, better law enforcement and education, and improved incomes for women would all reduce the problem to the level of tragedy rather than statistic. Culture will organically change from there on its own.

Even those areas undergoing rapid economic growth are also undergoing rapid inflation and not seeing much of a concurrent improvement in provision of public services. So while the poverty headcount might be lower, it’s still shitty to be poor. And I say again, a state or city level analysis to control for income and education just isn’t going to work. Those sorts of decisions are made at the household level and unless you can come up with a household level survey that can get you a reliable count on foeticide or female infanticide you are not going to accurately capture the effect of any of your control variables. Just because an area has more money and more educated people doesn’t mean every individual in the area does and it doesn’t mean that people who are nominally rich relative to the countryside are going to be rich relative to their neighbors or richer in terms of real income. Middle class Indians don’t typically get pensions and girls do represent a significant cost that doesn’t get recouped relative to boys. If you want to change that you need to change incentives.

Perhaps you can take your own advice and go read something else?

Why? Because retribution is a turn off?

1 and a half inches long.

Its called retribution for milleniums of objectification.