Re:The Population Bomb Has Been Defused
by nostrademons on Sunday March 18, 2018 @05:03PM
(#16614320)
Something that occurred to me (but I don't have data or time to follow up):
I wonder if the U-shaped curve for sex ratio imbalances vs. societal violence reflects both causation and correlation. The dynamics would work like this:
An oversupply of young, unmarried males in a population leads to intense competition for mates and for the resources that attract mates (jobs, money, territory, social status, etc). This triggers instincts in our brains that make us more competitive, and more willing to band together with others to remove potential competition. At some point this reaches a critical mass, populations go to war, and most of the excess males are killed off. This leads to an oversupply of females, but because of social inertia (people don't immediately adjust their behavior after massive depopulation, it takes time to adjust to the new reality), the society remains violent for some time afterwards, even though the sex ratio is now very skewed in favor of women. The data would show a U-shaped curve, but the oversupply of males would be the cause of violence while the oversupply of females would be a consequence of violence.
To verify this hypothesis, there'd need to be a time and historical context attached to each data point, so that in addition to looking at the sex ratio, we'd look at the sex ratio trend before and after the outbreak of violence and on what timeframe violence rates go down. I'm unaware of studies that have done this.
I wonder if the U-shaped curve for sex ratio imbalances vs. societal violence reflects both causation and correlation. The dynamics would work like this:
An oversupply of young, unmarried males in a population leads to intense competition for mates and for the resources that attract mates (jobs, money, territory, social status, etc). This triggers instincts in our brains that make us more competitive, and more willing to band together with others to remove potential competition. At some point this reaches a critical mass, populations go to war, and most of the excess males are killed off. This leads to an oversupply of females, but because of social inertia (people don't immediately adjust their behavior after massive depopulation, it takes time to adjust to the new reality), the society remains violent for some time afterwards, even though the sex ratio is now very skewed in favor of women. The data would show a U-shaped curve, but the oversupply of males would be the cause of violence while the oversupply of females would be a consequence of violence.
To verify this hypothesis, there'd need to be a time and historical context attached to each data point, so that in addition to looking at the sex ratio, we'd look at the sex ratio trend before and after the outbreak of violence and on what timeframe violence rates go down. I'm unaware of studies that have done this.