http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2007/08/02/bc-femalefoeticide.html

Also note the phone numbers for the Blaine, WA clinic are area code 604, Vancouver’s area code, not area code 360, western Washington state’s area code.

Gee, I wonder who are the main patients of that clinic…

e.g. of desi female power.

Tangible and intangible are not descriptions of economics – they’re ways of discussing whether or not you can and are willing to measure economic activity in numbers. If you want it more simply – product of all work that the woman does which is not of direct benefit to her = income to someone else (family, society, neighbor, etc.). All consumption that the woman has (food, clothing, etc.) that she does not pay for herself = cost to someone else (family, society, neighbor, etc.). I say the first is greater than the second. The original commenter asked if the second is greater than the first. to conclusively demonstrate either proposition would take a lot of work. This is what economists (and particularly feminist economists) try to do. However, there is no theoretical reason why one shuold compeltely discount economic activity (i.e. labor that produces services, goods, or somethign else) that someone does and simply look at what is already being counted – if we were going to do that, then India’s GDP would be like a fifth of what it is or something, because the informal economy wouldn’t be counted.

An unemotional analysis can quantify it.

By all means, go for it. Quantify the costs of 9 months of labor and who those benefits accrue to and in what quantitiies (or units) or the number of convesrations a mother has with a child in its first five years in terms of the educational value to the child (and consequently to society for the child as a future worker). You’re talking about stuff that people have argued over for generations (like how to measure economic value – marx says in labor hours or something like it, marginalists have an entirely different take on it, feminist economists argue something different, etc.).

As for passing inheritance to daughter, no formal avenue ever existed in 5000 years of Indian society. Again, the social consequences have been very undesirable, the original intent was probably not deliberate.

I have a number objections to this, but just one is important here – why does the intent matter? If something is undesirable, and it is recognised that it is undesirable, who cares what the itnent was except insofar as it mattesr in finding a solution.

It is not in Indian nature for 20 men to sit in a room smoking hooka and coming up with a plan to control society.

I know. After work, they sit in their living rooms, resting comfortably while their daughters and sons and wives or household servants (also often female) do their dishes for them and wash their clothes and make their tea. You don’t have to come with a plan if you already control everything. but some of them try anyway, and they sit in Parliament, in state legislatures, in the bureaucracies, in ministries, as judges, as barristers, as the head of companies etc etc etc

Micro finance is not a silver-bullet for everything. An it may be the new bubble.

see

A Global Surge in Tiny Loans Spurs Credit Bubble in a Slum

Also, another opinion of mine is that wedding costs can be brought down in general by de-emphasizing spending a lot of money on these weddings. Again, this opinion is just representing myself, and people around the world are free to do as they chose.

This I think is an important point. but it’s just my opinion.

Thats good, because I am curious if any postings have been done to talk about inequalities between men and women in western society?

These extreme cases of women being put down in backward societies are also worth discussing, but do people in SM believe in an equal society ultimately?

To be on-topic… microfinance is helping women all over the subcontinent, but a lot of the money simply goes toward household repairs and the children’s school fees. I’m not sure how the women manage to pay the loan back while simply continuing in the agricultural coolie work they always did.