The vicious circle of female foeticide

John Kenneth Galbraith, a “hyperliterate economic sage” in the words of Steven Levitt, coined the term “conventional wisdom.” Galbraith did not consider it to be a compliment.

We associate truth with convenience with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem.

Economic and social behaviour are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore, we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding.

Female foeticide in India is a rational phenomenon. In any society, we have a large number of individuals with potential interests making decisions all the time that will affect their lives and lives of others. Jeremy Bentham was one of the first moral philosophers to point out that people respond to incentives.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand, the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.

This philosophy of pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain is compatible with biological nature of humans. In a country like India, the birth of a female child attaches a social stigma to the mother who bore her and elicits anger and resentment from her in-laws because females are considered to be a financial burden. A large number of young couples opt for pre-natal sex determination through ultrasound technology which is widely available across the country. Among the poor, the practice of infanticide is prevalent. Conventional wisdom says this is Indian culture, but economists believe that the roots of culture lie in the relative prosperity of any society.

Conventional wisdom screams stop killing babies, for god’s sake! The media is talking about it and the blogosphere is ringing. Every day we come across news stories wherein the law and order authorities discover female foetuses and bodies of female infants dumped near private clinics. We even label these people hideous perverts, but unsurprisingly, they are the people from within our society. They are everywhere. And they are acting rationally too. They are simply responding to incentives. Females are socially constrained* from producing as much utility as a male member in a family. Due to this, the desire to have another female in the family is daunted by the desire of having a male member. And as a consequence, females are actively disregarded by the family members and are unable to match the males in production of capital. It is the individual choices of family members that are paving the way for a vicious circle and a deep-rooted collective culture of prejudice against females.

The government in its own grandeur comes up with schemes and presents its own means for the so-called empowerment of women. The society is often worse off than it was before these reforms were put in place. Statistics indicate that the number of females per 1000 males has steadily decreased during the post-independence era. According to Nobel laureate and celebrated economist Amartya Sen, there are 50 million women missing in India. The evil prevails and it is fast consuming the ethos of our society.

Perhaps it is time to shelve our veneers of conceit and discard the hollow pride that consumes us in the name of religion and culture. Perhaps it is time to unlearn conventional wisdom and come to terms with reality.

The truth is that we have all the wrong incentives in place which have in turn yielded undesirable results.

*Females are socially and biologically constrained due to their role in production of human capital. Females spend a considerable amount of time and resources in the production of babies and are evolutionarily more adept at rearing children than human males.