Sunday, December 30, 2012
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Monday, December 24, 2012
Can economics help us understand violence against women in India?
Can
economics help us understand violence against women in India?
Vivek
Dehejia
In the aftermath of the Delhi rape case, and amidst the welter of moral
outrage, hand-wringing, and public demonstrations, that, understandably, have
followed in its wake, it’s important to take a step or two back and ask some
deeper questions.
What is the root cause of violence against women? Is it misogyny that is
deeply engrained in our still patriarchal culture? Is it the churning of a
society in flux, as “old” India confronts “new” India, as some commentators have
suggested? Does it have to do with a broken criminal justice system that fails
to deliver justice? Is it a backlash against the increasing economic and social
empowerment of women?
One of the basic lessons of social science is that a complex phenomenon
such as violence against women rarely, if ever, has a unique explanation, a
single driving causal mechanism. Rather, such phenomena are “over-determined”,
plausibly explainable by a multitude of different hypotheses, which aren’t
necessarily mutually exclusive nor exhaustive. In simple terms, all of the
factors noted above are likely to be at work, and recent research bears on
several of them.
In our new book, “Indianomix: Making Sense of Modern India”, my
co-author and I devote a significant portion of one chapter to looking more
deeply at the issue of violence against women and probing what the research has
to say. The following is based, in part, on the research that we present in
that chapter.
First off, there’s much, and legitimate, criticism of the quality of
data that scholars have to work with. Rape and other violent crimes against
women tend to go under-reported in India, as they do elsewhere, and this
certainly “contaminates” (in a statistical sense) the quality of the data.
Statistically, the correct response is not to discard such data as worthless,
as some have suggested, but to “treat” (again, in a statistical sense) the data
appropriately. For instance, in the face of systematic under-reporting of
violence against women, statistics on the incidence of rape at any given point
of time may be misleading; but its rate of change over time is still statistically
meaningful. Thus, the fact that incidence of rape and violence against women
show an increasing trend is worrisome.
On the other hand, though, an increase in the incidence of violence
against women may also reflect increased reporting of such crimes and a more
accurate classification – that is, a crime that was previously categorized as
generic violence is now correctly categorized as, for instance, a rape. Some
recent research, indeed, suggests that increasing political and economic
empowerment of women has had exactly these effects, and so part of the
increased reported incidence may actually reflect better reporting rather than
an increase in the actual incidence. However, it remains for future research to
parse the increase in reported crimes against women into these two components.
Another question that goes unasked in the predictable knee jerk reaction
to a tragedy such as the recent one is to probe the deeper causes of the high
incidence of violent crime, especially violence against women, in India. In the
book, we explore one important hypothesis that comes out of academic research
both in India and in other places such as China: that there is a robust
statistical correlation between the skewed sex ratio (that is, more men than
women) and the incidence of murder and other violent crimes including rape. By
no means is it claimed that the sex ratio is the only variable that can explain
crime; rather, it is one of a group of other important socio-economic factors.
The great difficulty with any statistical correlation is that it doesn’t
necessarily imply a causal relationship, nor does it tell us the direction of
causality, in case such a relationship exists. Does an adverse sex ratio cause
violence? This would be if, for example, lots of single angry young men are
roaming around and are violence-prone as a consequence. It’s noteworthy that in
the Delhi rape case, the oldest of the alleged perpetrators is only 33 and the
youngest is a juvenile and all but one of them is single. Of course, a single
data point doesn’t confirm or refute a theory, but it certainly fits a
suggestive pattern. It’s not just India where a skewed sex ratio is seen as an
underlying driver of violence including against women. Some scholarship
suggests that this explains the increase in violent crime in China, where the
sex ratio is even worse than in India.
But in economics, things are rarely so simple. It could equally be that,
in a society which already has a skewed sex ratio, families will prefer to have
boys rather than girls, both because boys offer greater protection to parents
when they grow up and because daughters will be at greater risk in a violent
society. A statistical correlation by itself cannot discriminate between these
two competing explanations.
What’s more, in the rarefied world of statistics, there are two other
possibilities: first, that the correlation is “spurious”, and, second, that
there is an “omitted variable” which is the underlying cause of the
correlation. In the case of the skewed sex ratio and violent crime, one can
safely discard the possibility of spurious correlation, since there are
compelling causal mechanisms one can point to running in either direction. But
one cannot dismiss the idea that a deeper force is at work which leads both to
a skewed sex ratio and more violent crime. The natural candidates are
patriarchy and misogyny that are deeply embedded in our culture and have been slow
to change. Indeed, it is the fact of “son preference”, which is a product of a
patriarchal society, that itself is the underlying cause of sex-selective
abortion, which in turn is one, although not the only, driver of a skewed sex
ratio.
Deeply held cultural values and beliefs – even hateful ones such as
misogyny – are slow to change and difficult, if not impossible, to legislate
away. The correct response is not despair, nor a knee jerk appeal to barbaric
punishments such as the death penalty or “chemical castration” of convicted
rapists. The copious mass of evidence from the United States does not
unequivocally support the widely held idea that capital punishment serves as a
deterrent to future crime.
The unglamorous but right answer is to alter the incentives that
would-be rapists and other assailants face when they contemplate a sexual
assault, tilting them away rather than toward such crimes. The fact that, as of
last year, only about a quarter of cases against alleged perpetrators of rape
resulted in conviction is a telling statistic. What is the use of ratcheting up
punishment from life imprisonment to the death penalty if there is still a
three in four chance of an alleged perpetrator walking away scot-free? Whatever one's view on the morality of capital punishment, the salient point is that its efficacy as a deterrent is in serious doubt given such grim statistics.
While the research on the deterrent effect of severe punishment is hotly
contested, as noted above, what is incontrovertible is that a criminal justice
system which would efficiently and fairly mete out justice under our existing
legal system will go a long way toward reducing the incidence of such horrific
crimes.
We need to draw the correct lessons from the recent tragedy and not
allow our understandable anger and revulsion to point us toward superficially
appealing but misguided solutions.
Vivek Dehejia
is an economics professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He is
co-author, with Rupa Subramanya, of “Indianomix: Making Sense of Modern India”,
just published by Random House India.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
A fantastic review of "Indianomix" in Tehelka!
A fantastic review of "Indianomix" by Ashok Malik in Tehelka magazine. Calls it "remarkable", "never dull", "quintessentially Indian"! "In the end, this book is about two students of economics having fun. Read it, so will you."
http://tehelka.com/its-the-economy-stupid/
http://tehelka.com/its-the-economy-stupid/
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Monday, December 17, 2012
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
Indianomix available on Kindle!
While the paper edition of "Indianomix" is currently available only in India, there's good news for those who want to read it: it's available for immediate download in an electronic version for Kindle. You can get it from the respective Amazon websites.
Here's the link for Canada: http://www.amazon.ca/Indianomix-Making-Sense-Modern-ebook/dp/B00AKFIKGG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355123742&sr=8-1
Here's the link for Canada: http://www.amazon.ca/Indianomix-Making-Sense-Modern-ebook/dp/B00AKFIKGG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355123742&sr=8-1
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Monday, December 3, 2012
First excerpts and coverage of content from "Indianomix" appears today!
The Wall Street Journal India publishes a first excerpt from "Indianomix" here.
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/12/03/indianomix-what-if/
And in FirstPost, Vivek Kaul considers the question "Would India have grown faster if it wasn't a democracy?" drawing also on the same chapter in "Indianomix":
http://www.firstpost.com/economy/would-india-have-grown-faster-if-it-wasnt-a-democracy-542780.html
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/12/03/indianomix-what-if/
And in FirstPost, Vivek Kaul considers the question "Would India have grown faster if it wasn't a democracy?" drawing also on the same chapter in "Indianomix":
http://www.firstpost.com/economy/would-india-have-grown-faster-if-it-wasnt-a-democracy-542780.html
Sunday, December 2, 2012
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