
Inconvenient truth hiding behind the excitement about educating girls. - Anon84
http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/whats_sex_got_to_do_with_it
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anovikov
My sincere belief is that the change of reproductive patterns of women (and
all associated social, human rights, and political change) is just a
consequence of economic growth and demands which it brings up. Change in
mortality, on the other hand, obviously results from vaccinations.

Western countries who invented both things (economic growth through division
of labor and later, machines, and vaccines) have been lucky to keep both
processes approximately in line with each other, thus avoiding population
explosion (while even them didn't completely evade trouble).

Then they brought vaccines (that are cheap) to developing countries out of
their 'humanistic' values, but could not bring modern economy along with it.

We see the result. Genie is out of the bottle - and there is nothing we could
do. We cannot bring modern economy to these countries quickly. We cannot
deprive them of vaccines, because they are cheap and they can even afford
buying them without any foreign assistance.

Trying to fix this with some sort of 'education for girls' before the economic
stimulus (market demand for women to join the organized labor force) arrives
resembles attempts by Russians to build communism by killing all capitalists
and forcing everyone to work. They will call these attempts 'sinful' and
'brought by our enemies who don't respect our traditional way of life', and
rightly so.

All we can do it just sit and wait, that's my guess. Social change does not
come by itself, or as a result of some external manipulation, it is always a
product of change in productive forces.

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e12e
I really hope more aid organizations will heed this and similar advice, and
understand that family planning via sexual education and the availability of
contraceptives is going to be one of our best chances for a better world.

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lutusp
A quote from the article: "Larry Summers, former president of Harvard
University, who was widely criticized for his 2008 comment about women’s lack
of natural aptitude for science and math, ..."

It's false -- Summers said no such thing. Summer's remarks were widely
misinterpreted and led to his resignation from Harvard, but his point was
simple and has been made by many: there is a theory that both genders have
exactly the same mean I.Q., but for evolutionary reasons men's sigma (standard
deviation) is wider -- meaning men are more likely to be outliers than women,
both smarter and dumber. So, on average, and contrary to the claim in the
article, Summers said men and women have the same aptitude for math and
science.

In other respects the article is constructive -- if women cannot control their
own fertility, they can't control anything. This makes free access to
reproductive methods and rights, and education, a top priority.

