The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [52]
Studies across the developing world have found that women make more productive decisions than men about the allocation of household resources. In particular, they invest considerably more in their children’s welfare. One study among female tea pickers in rural China found that the survival rates of baby girls increased when tea prices rose. The educational attainment of girls and boys improved noticeably too. This was because rising tea prices boosted women’s wages, ensuring more investment in their children’s health and education.
When Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist Army fled to Taiwan in 1949 after being defeated by Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army, sex ratios in Taiwan tilted abruptly in girls’ favor, as the island was suddenly flooded with young single men. This enhanced women’s bargaining power in the mating market. As a result, the survival rates of baby girls increased, fertility fell, and investments in children’s education grew.
Realizing its predicament, the Chinese government has now set about formulating policies to increase the value of women in their parents’ eyes through programs like the “Care for Girls” initiative, which offered free public education for females and other incentives. And it has even begun to selectively loosen the one-child policy. Three decades after its inception, Shanghai authorities are even offering financial incentives to families who want to have a second child.
If nothing else, the gender imbalance has opened some new business opportunities for women in the marriage market. Payments to the bride’s family, a common institution in rural China known as cai li, have surged since the early 2000s, reaching tens of thousands of yuan as rural families become increasingly desperate about finding wives for their sons at any price. The Wall Street Journal reported that in Hanzhong, in Shaanxi, central China, eleven newly minted brides had fled from their husbands in a matter of two months—and taken their bride price with them.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Price of Work
THE INTERNATIONAL LABOUR ORGANIZATION estimates that, excluding sex workers, 8.1 million people around the world are coerced into doing their jobs. That’s not very many, if one considers the popularity of coerced labor through human history.
Slavery and forced labor were prevalent from the Aztec and the Islamic empires to Rome and ancient Greece, from feudal Europe to the antebellum American South. By some standards one might think today’s labor markets are well suited to coercion: it would help employers save real money. These days workers draw almost 65 percent of the nation’s income in wages and benefits—about ten percentage points more than they did eighty years ago, when the government started measuring the statistic consistently. That kind of money seems like a fairly potent incentive for their employers to enslave them. So why don’t they?
Perhaps we’ve learned to be repulsed by slavery. But the historical record suggests that societies’ choice of working conditions has less to do with values and morality, and more with the profitability of how labor is organized. From sixteenth-century Russia to the European colonies in the New World, the decision of whether to employ indentured or free workers has hinged on whether it is cheaper to pay a wage or to feed, clothe, and house slaves while paying for security to keep them enslaved.
Throughout history, slavery was rare in subsistence economies, such as early hunter-gatherer societies where people produced just enough to stay alive. In early horticulturalist cultures, land was not productive enough to generate a surplus that would justify enslaving additional workers. But as advances in food production generated surpluses that could feed larger populations and justify employing additional workers, landowners