The Trouble with Boys
Posted by fazeer on 19 August, 2008
From Esther Duflo (at Vox) on China’s One-Child Policy:
This “only child” generation is now reaching adulthood. A child born in 1980 is now 28 years old, and China is beginning to realise the consequences of this demographic imbalance. Among 16-25 year olds today, there are nearly 110 boys for every 100 girls…
To what extent is the rise in the number of young men responsible for the increase in crime? A recent study by Edlund, Li, Yi, and Zhang…concludes that the one-child policy explains one-seventh of the increase in crime.
Why?
…the difficulty that young men have getting married is probably one source of this phenomenon. A long-term study of Vietnam veterans in 1998, cited in a recent New Republic article, provides some clue as to why. The subjects’ testosterone levels, which are linked to aggression and violence, dropped when they married and increased when they divorced. Men who remain single maintain high levels of testosterone, which may make them particularly aggressive.
