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There’s one important caveat: a drunk walker isn’t likely to hurt or kill anyone other than her-or himself. That can’t be said of a drunk driver. In fatal accidents involving alcohol, 36 percent of the victims are either passengers, pedestrians, or other drivers. Still, even after factoring in the deaths of those innocents, walking drunk leads to five times as many deaths per mile as driving drunk.

So as you leave your friend’s party, the decision should be clear: driving is safer than walking. (It would be even safer, obviously, to drink less, or to call a cab.) The next time you put away four glasses of wine at a party, maybe you’ll think through your decision a bit differently. Or, if you’re too far gone, maybe your friend will help sort things out. Because friends don’t let friends walk drunk.

If you had the option of being born anywhere in the world today, India might not be the wisest choice. Despite its vaunted progress as a major player in the global economy, the country as a whole remains excruciatingly poor. Life expectancy and literacy rates are low; pollution and corruption are high. In the rural areas where more than two-thirds of Indians live, barely half of the households have electricity and only one in four homes has a toilet.

It is especially unlucky to be born female, because many Indian parents express a strong “son preference.” Only 10 percent of Indian families with two sons want another child, whereas nearly 40 percent of families with two daughters want to try again. Giving birth to a baby boy is like giving birth to a 401(k) retirement fund. He will grow up to be a wage-earning man who can provide for his parents in their sunset years and, when the time comes, light the funeral pyre. Having a baby girl, meanwhile, means relabeling the retirement fund a dowry fund. Although the dowry system has long been under assault, it is still common for a bride’s parents to give the groom or his family cash, cars, or real estate. The bride’s family is also expected to pay for the wedding.

The U.S. charity Smile Train, which performs cleft-repair surgery on poor children around the world, recently spent some time in Chennai, India. When one local man was asked how many children he had, he answered “one.” The organization later learned that the man did have a son—but he also had five daughters, who apparently didn’t warrant a mention. Smile Train also learned that midwives in Chennai were sometimes paid $2.50 to smother a baby girl born with a cleft deformity—and so, putting the lure of incentives to good use, the charity began offering midwives as much as $10 for each baby girl they took to a hospital for cleft surgery.

Girls are so undervalued in India that there are roughly 35 million fewer females than males in the population. Most of these “missing women,” as the economist Amartya Sen calls them, are presumed dead, either by indirect means (the girl’s parents withheld nutrition or medical care, perhaps to the benefit of a brother), direct harm (the baby girl was killed after birth, whether by a midwife or a parent), or, increasingly, a pre-birth decision. Even in India’s smallest villages, where electricity might be sporadic and clean water hard to find, a pregnant woman can pay a technician to scan her belly with an ultrasound and, if the fetus is female, have an abortion. In recent years, as these sex-selective abortions have become more common, the male-female ratio in India—as well as in other son-worshipping countries like China-has grown even more lopsided.

A baby Indian girl who does grow into adulthood faces inequality at nearly every turn. She will earn less money than a man, receive worse health care and less education, and perhaps be subjected to daily atrocities. In a national health survey, 51 percent of Indian men said that wife-beating is justified under certain circumstances; more surprisingly, 54 percent of women agreed—if, for instance, a wife burns dinner or leaves the house without permission. More than 100,000 young Indian women die in