On 10-04-2011 10:31, Udhay Shankar N wrote: > On 10-Apr-11 10:21 AM, Aadisht Khanna wrote: > >>> in a situation where *muscle power* is of monotonically decreasing >>> importance to survival, why would the sex ratio be as skewed as it is? >>> >> >> Hysteresis. > > Fair enough (as far as it goes), but the length of lag is a matter of > serious concern at this point.
I read Jane Jacobs' _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_ last year and was very (perhaps overly) impressed with it. What follows is heavily influenced by my fanboyhood for that book, and perhaps is a little extreme. With that caveat in place... Shoba's original article had talked about normative preferences changing with modernisation and economic growth. I am pessimistic that the time taken for these changes to kick in will be much longer in India than in China/ Korea because India has a whole bunch of barriers to modernisation. The barriers I mean are that we have a) diversity of religion, language, class, caste, and so forth b) that this diversity acts to ghettoize our cities, or even worse (in the case of language) to not just create ghettos but to make migration to cities impossible. Cities of the sort that Jane Jacobs idealises accelerate the spread of norms/ ideas/ memes/ call them what you will. However because we have all these different barriers to "the humane interaction of strangers" inside our cities, they lose out on that acceleration. Also our approach to diversity is not the 1850-1950 American melting pot approach, so we cannot take that route to creating an urban culture. The Western/ Central European approach to creating cities is also blocked to us: that was based on cities as largely independent political entities that acted as a counterweight to the feudal countryside. But we have powerful national and regional governments compared to central governments, so the path of cities growing by sucking in immigrants is closed to us. Heck, our state and central government rhetoric is all about *preventing* migration to cities. For example, one of the advantages the government claims for the NREGA is that it will slow down rural emigration. To me, this is a bug, not a feature. That means that India will eventually have to spread this normative change in our faux-cities and villages (which will be slow) or figure out a uniquely Indian way to create great cities (which will also take time). Either way, there will be a lag. (By "we" I meant India as a whole.) -- Regards, Aadisht Email for lists: li...@aadisht.net Personal Email: aadi...@aadisht.net Mobile (TN): +91-96000 23067 Website: http://www.aadisht.net/ Blog: http://www.wokay.in/
