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01 / 05
Grim Old Days: Fernand Braudel’s Structures of Everyday Life

Blog Post | Human Development

Grim Old Days: Fernand Braudel’s Structures of Everyday Life

“The poor in the towns and countryside of the West lived in a state of almost complete deprivation."

Summary: Fernand Braudel’s book offers a vivid exploration of the harsh realities of pre-industrial life, from deadly wildlife encounters and frequent famines to the widespread use of primitive table manners. Braudel delves into the grim aspects of daily existence, highlighting the pervasive dangers and struggles that defined life before modern advancements. His work paints a stark picture of a world where survival was precarious, and comfort was a rare and costly luxury.


The French historian Fernand Braudel’s ambitious book, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, paints a sweeping and vivid picture of many aspects of life in the past, from the shocking frequency of deadly wildlife encounters and famines to plagues and violence.

“There is a drawing which shows Maximilian of Austria at a table, in about 1513: he is putting his hand into a dish. Two centuries or so later, the Princess Palatine tells how Louis XIV, when he allowed his children to sit up to table for the first time, forbade them to eat differently from him, and in particular to eat with a fork as an over-zealous tutor had taught them.” Even the Queen of France from 1615 to 1643, “Anne of Austria ate her meat with her fingers all her life. And so did the Court of Vienna until at least 1651.”

“The individual fork dates from about the sixteenth century. . . . We know that Montaigne did not use a fork, since he accuses himself of eating too quickly so that ‘I sometimes bite my fingers in my haste.’”

How the table settings in various artists’ depictions of The Last Supper (a frequent subject in Western art) changed over time is revealing: “no fork appears before 1600 and almost no spoons either.”

“The use of a spoon did not become widespread until the sixteenth century, and the custom of providing knives dates from the same time—before that the guests brought along their own. Individual glasses for each guest also appeared at about this time. Courtesy formerly dictated that one emptied the glass and passed it on to one’s neighbour, who did the same.” Even individual plates are relatively recent; previously, a single dish was brought out on a wooden board and “each selected the morsel he wanted and picked it up with his fingers.”

The state of table manners is hinted at in an Austrian ordinance from 1624 instructing young officers on how to behave when dining with an archduke, which specifies: “not to arrive half drunk, not to drink after every mouthful, … not to lick the fingers, not to spit in the plate, not to wipe the nose on the tablecloth, not to gulp drink like animals.” Separate dining rooms were rare until the 16th century, and then only among the rich.

Pepper was a rare luxury. Among 15th-century explorers, “as dear as pepper” was a common expression (“dear” being used in the sense meaning “expensive”).

Salt was consumed in unhealthily large quantities in a desperate attempt to improve the taste of the masses’ monotonous and unappetizing diets. “In the Europe of insipid farinaceous gruels consumption of salt was large . . . twenty grams daily per person,” far exceeding the present-day figure.” To put that into perspective, the US Food and Drug Administration’s nutritional guidelines currently recommend limiting salt consumption to 2.3 grams per person per day; on average, Americans eat about 3.4 grams of salt per day, overshooting recommendations but still lagging far behind what was typical in the preindustrial world. Outside of Europe, too, the impoverished majority turned to salt out of desperation to enliven their similarly bland, unvaried staple foods. As an Indian writer put it, “When the palate revolts against the insipidness of rice boiled with no other ingredients, we dream of fat, salt and spices.”

“Famine recurred so insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into man’s biological regime and built into his daily life. Dearth and penury were continual, and familiar. . . . Two consecutive bad harvests spelt disaster.”

“Any national calculation shows a sad story. France, by any standards a privileged country, is reckoned to have experienced 10 general famines during the tenth century: 26 in the eleventh; 2 in the twelfth; 4 in the fourteenth; 7 in the fifteenth; 13 in the sixteenth; 11 in the seventeenth and 16 in the eighteenth. . . . [Much] the same could be said of any country in Europe.” Braudel relates that a third of Finland’s population is estimated to have died of starvation during a famine from 1696 to 1697. “Florence . . . experienced 111 years when people went hungry, and only sixteen ‘very good’ harvests between 1371 and 1791.” “Near Blois in 1662, a witness reported that [due to famine] the poor were on a diet of ‘cabbage stumps with bran soaked in cod broth.’” A decade earlier, in 1652, a chronicler noted, “the people of Lorraine and other surrounding lands are reduced to such extremities that, like animals, they eat the grass in the meadows.” In 1694 near Meulan, famine again made it so that “large numbers of people lived on grass like animals.” In 1674–76, in southeastern France, people were reportedly reduced to eating “acorns and roots.”

Beyond Europe, famine was also frequent and severe. “In 1555, and again in 1596, violent famine throughout north-west India, resulted in scenes of cannibalism, according to contemporary chroniclers. There was another terrible famine, almost everywhere in India, in 1630–31. A Dutch merchant has left us an appalling description of it: ‘Men abandoned towns and villages and wandered helplessly: It was easy to recognize their condition: eyes sunk deep in the head, lips pale and covered with slime, the skin hard, with the bones showing through, the belly nothing but a pouch hanging down empty. . . . One would cry and howl for hunger, while another lay stretched on the ground dying in misery.’” The famine caused “collective suicides. . . . Then came the stage when the starving split open the stomachs of the dead or dying and ‘drew at the entrails to fill their own bellies’. ‘Many hundred thousands of men died of hunger, so that the whole country was covered with corpses lying unburied, which caused such a stench that the whole air was filled and infected with it . . . in the village of Susuntra . . . human flesh was sold in open market.”

Some Europeans also resorted to cannibalism in times of famine; in 1662 in Burgundy, contemporary accounts say that “famine this year has put an end to over ten thousand families . . . and forced a third of the inhabitants, even in the good towns, to eat wild plants. . . . Some people ate human flesh.”

Even in good times, peasants often subsisted on “gruels, sops and bread” that barely provided any nutritional value. “Bread was almost always hard and mouldy.” “Bread was sometimes bread in name alone.” By some estimates, “no more than 4% of the European population ate white bread. Even at the beginning of the eighteenth century, half the rural population fed on non-bread-making cereals and rye, and a lot of bran was left in the mixture of grains that went to make bread for the poor. Wheaten bread and white bread . . . remained a luxury for a long time.” It was only between 1750 and 1850 that white bread became more widely available.

In some societies, meat was so scarce as to be the preserve of the wealthy. “‘One has to be a very great lord in Sumatra,’ said one seventeenth-century traveller, ‘to have a boiled or roast chicken, which moreover has to last for the whole day.’” Today, meanwhile, one can purchase a whole rotisserie chicken from Costco for $4.99 and casually gorge on what was once a delicacy.

Nutritional deficiencies harmed human health and may have even prevented children from reaching their intellectual potential. “The Dictionnaire de Trévoux (1771) says quite bluntly: ‘The peasants are usually so stupid because they only live on coarse foods.’”

Water was also often scarce. “Whole towns—and very wealthy ones at that—were poorly supplied with water.” One example was Venice. “When no rain fell for weeks on end, the cisterns ran dry; this happened when [the 19th-century French writer] Stendhal was staying in the city. If there was a storm they were tainted with salt water.” “In 1770, Thames water ‘which is not good’ was carried to all the houses in London … but this was not what we would usually think of as running water: it was ‘distributed regularly three times a week, according to the amount consumed per household.”

Even when water was supplied, it was often tainted. The use of lead, a powerful toxin, in piping “is recorded in England in 1236.” Exposure to lead in drinking water is now known to cause many negative health effects, including debilitating lifelong brain damage and stunted growth in children, anemia and cardiovascular problems in adults, and in pregnant women, a heightened risk of miscarriage. In Paris, the main water source was the thick sludge of the Seine: “It was supposed to bear boats well, being muddy and therefore heavy, as a Portuguese envoy reported in 1641—not that this quality would recommend itself to drinkers.” Indeed, the water source doubled as a dumping site for toxic waste. “‘A number of dyers pour their dye three times a week into the branch of the river which washes the Pelletier quay and between the two bridges,’ said an eye witness (1771). ‘The arch which forms the Gêvres quai is a seat of pestilence. All that part of the town drinks infected waters.’”

Such poor diets and tainted water made people more vulnerable to every illness. “The undernourished, unprotected population could offer little resistance to [epidemics, hence] the Tuscan proverb [says] ‘The best remedy against malaria is a well filled pot.’ Undernourishment, on all the evidence, is a ‘multiplying’ factor in the spread of diseases.”

“To mention only smallpox: in 1775, when inoculation was beginning to be discussed, a medical book considered it ‘the most general of all diseases’; ninety-five in every hundred people were affected; one in seven died.” In 1780, a mysterious illness dubbed “purple fever” is said to have killed so many hundreds of Parisians that “the gravediggers’ arms were falling off.” Influenza struck often as well. “In 1588, it laid low (but did not kill) the entire population of Venice, to the point where the Grand Council was empty.” A mysterious “sweating sickness” plagued England from 1486 to 1551, with five major outbreaks, also striking Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland: “The victims had fits of shivering and sweated profusely and were often dead within hours.” Even the rich could not escape the ravages of disease. “Tuberculosis was also an old scourge of Europe: Francis II (tubercular meningitis), Charles IX (pulmonary tuberculosis) and Louis XIII (intestinal tuberculosis) all fell victim to it (1560, 1574, 1643).”

Even royalty received atrociously ineffective and occasionally deadly medical care. The itinerant physician Arnaud de Villeneuve (c. 1240–c. 1313) claimed, “brandy, aqua vitae, accomplished the miracle of preserving youth, dissipated superfluous body fluids, revived the heart, cured colic, drops: paralysis, quartan ague, calmed toothache and gave protection against plague. But his miracle cure brought Charles the Bad, of execrable memory, to a terrible end (1387); doctors had enveloped him in a brandy-soaked sheet sewn up with large stitches for greater efficiency so that it fitted rightly round the patient. A servant held a candle up close to try to break one of the threads, and sheet and invalid went up in flames.”

Outbreaks of deadly disease caused not only deaths but social discord among survivors. Braduel quotes the English diarist Samuel Pepys in 1665 calling the bubonic plague “the plague making us cruel, as doggs, one to another.” Braudel quotes Daniel Defoe’s account of the 1664 plague of London, saying that the dead were thrown “for the most part on to a cart like common dung.” The outbreaks were frequent. “Plague occurred in Amsterdam every year from 1622 to 1628 (the toll: 35,000 dead). It struck Paris in 1612, 1619, 1631, 1638, 1662, 1668 (the last).” Those who did survive the poverty, famines, and plagues of the past were often prematurely aged. In 1754, Braudel quotes one author as noting that “the peasants in France . . . begin to decline before they are forty.”

“The poor in the towns and countryside of the West lived in a state of almost complete deprivation. Their furniture consisted of next to nothing, at least before the eighteenth century, when a rudimentary luxury began to spread (chairs, where before people had been content with benches, woollen mattresses, feather beds) … But before the eighteenth century, … inventories mention only a few old clothes, a stool, a table, a bench, the planks of a bed, sacks filled with straw. Official reports for Burgundy between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries are full of references to people [sleeping] on straw with no bed or furniture’ who were only separated ‘from the pigs by a with a screen.’”

“Travellers’ tales are full of savage beasts. One seventeenth-century account describes tigers prowling round Asian villages and towns, and swimming out into the Ganges delta to surprise fisherman asleep in their boats.”

“No one feels safe after nightfall, not even inside a house. One man went out of his hut in a small town near [Guangzhou], where the Jesuit father [Adriano] de Las Cortes and his fellow sufferers were imprisoned (1626), and was carried off by a tiger.”

“The whole of Europe, from the Urals to the Straits of Gibraltar, was the domain of wolves, and bears roamed in all its mountains. The omnipresence of wolves and the attention they aroused make wolf-hunting an index of the health of the countryside, and even of the towns, and of the character of the year gone by. A lapse in vigilance, an economic setback, a rough winter, and they multiplied. In 1420, packs entered Paris through a breach in the ramparts or unguarded gates. They were there again in September 1438, attacking people this time outside the town, between Montmartre and the Saint-Antoine gate. In 1640, wolves entered Besançon by crossing the Doubs near the mills of the town and ‘ate children along the roads.’”

“There was an example of this in Gevaudan ‘where the ravages of the wolves made people believe in the existence of an unnatural monster.’” A creature so lethal that it has become the stuff of legends, nicknamed the Beast of Gévaudan, terrorized France between 1764 and 1767, allegedly killing over 100 victims and maiming many more. The tragic loss of life even prompted King Louis XV to send troops to hunt the predator. Some scholars think the infamous maneater may have been a hyena or lion escaped from a menagerie based on conflicting descriptions of its appearance from the period, but details from the autopsy report after the animal was finally slain by a hunter suggest it was a canine, probably an unusually large wolf or wolf-dog hybrid that developed a marked taste for human flesh.

Knowing firsthand how deadly wolves could be, the French even considered using wolves as a form of biological warfare against the English. “In fact the Députés du Commerce were discussing in 1783 a proposal made several years earlier, to ‘introduce into England a sufficient number of wolves to destroy the greater part of the population.’”

And that is only a small taste of the past from Braudel’s lengthy tome.

Blog Post | Culture & Tolerance

Why the West Turned on Itself | Podcast Highlights

Chelsea Follett interviews Maarten Boudry about the cultural and ideological roots of Western anti-Western sentiment.

Listen to the podcast or read the full transcript here.

Joining me today is Maarten Boudry, a philosopher and author with eclectic interests, including progress, cultural evolution, conspiracy theories, and more. You should check out his Substack. He joins the podcast today to discuss a fascinating essay titled “The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers.”

You start with a very powerful and illustrative story about Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau was one of the first philosophers of the Romantic movement, which was a big part of the counter-Enlightenment. At this point in history, modernity hadn’t yet delivered anything tangible for the common people, but there was a relative measure of intellectual freedom, so, in that sense, we were already in the early stages of modernity.

Rousseau, before he was an established philosopher, was leafing through a magazine and came across an announcement for a prize by the Académie de Dijon. I don’t have the prize question with me here, but it was something to the effect of, “Have the improvements of the sciences also led to a betterment of morality in our society?” Rousseau describes that the moment he read that sentence, in a flash of insight, he saw the innocence of humanity in its original state and the depravity and decadence of civilization. And so he wrote his essay, a sweeping indictment of the whole of so-called civilization. It says that wherever the sciences are blossoming, wherever knowledge is improving, virtue is declining, and every supposedly great civilization eventually collapses under the weight of its own useless knowledge. By the way, he won the first prize—this is relevant for what comes next.

What I find fascinating is that Rousseau was a very cultured and educated man, but he condemned the whole idea of being refined and learned and cultured. In effect, he was biting the hand that feeds him. The Enlightenment philosophers had created this little island of intellectual freedom, which was the hand that was feeding him by giving him the freedom to study and exchange ideas. And he knew that hand would never punch him in the face. In fact, his friend Diderot encouraged him, even though he totally disagreed, because he relished the provocation of an Enlightenment philosopher tearing down the whole project of the Enlightenment.

That is one of the most fascinating and unique aspects of modernity. We do not just tolerate this sort of behavior; we encourage it. If you understand what is behind that story, it provides a lot of insight into what comes next in the 20th and 21st centuries: this very modern phenomenon of anti-modernity, the capitalist phenomenon of anti-capitalism, and the Western hatred of Western civilization.

Tell me more about the cultural trend of disdain toward Western civilization and capitalism.

There are a couple of different intellectual tributaries to this grand river of anti-modernity. There’s postmodernism, with the idea that we should undermine truth and reason, the foundations of modernity. There’s the victim versus oppressor narrative, sometimes called post-colonialism, which is the idea that you can neatly divide the world into oppressors and victims, which also leads to an indictment of Western civilization. And there’s environmentalism, which rejects the fruits of modernity. In the book, I ask the question, why do these different ideologies exist at all? Is there something about modernity that sows the seed of its own destruction?

The explanation that I eventually came up with is very simple: modern Western civilization is the only hand that allows itself to be bitten. If you were living under Stalin, you could never dream about criticizing the political ideology or economic system; dissent was just not tolerated. The same applies to China and to a lot of other unfree countries. And that leads to a sort of paradox, which I think was first described by an American politician called Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which is basically that there’s an inverse correlation between the number of complaints about human rights violations and the amount of actual human rights violations. If you ever find yourself in a society where nobody is complaining, and everyone agrees that the future will be glorious and the political system is great, you really have to get out of there as quickly as possible because that’s a completely totalitarian society.

You also talk about an alternative explanation: that this self-flagellation is some sort of mutation of Christianity.

As Nietzsche pointed out, a lot of the morality in Christian teachings is a kind of inversion, where the weaker and more vulnerable you are, the more virtuous you are. And there’s also the notion of original sin, that all of us are born tainted by evil. You can find these white guilt rituals on YouTube, where white people prostrate themselves in front of the people that their ancestors oppressed and ask for forgiveness. It’s very similar to the idea of original sin because, of course, they themselves didn’t own any slaves; it’s their whiteness itself, their identity, that they feel they have to apologize for.

However, many of these same people are also explicitly anti-Christian. They have completely secular upbringings and are rejecting Western civilization, which Christianity is part of. So, even though it’s possible that they’re unconsciously influenced by these Christian ways of thinking, it’s hard to prove. It also doesn’t work for all of the cases. It especially doesn’t work for the rightist forms of anti-modernity, which are muscular and aggressive and seem to be based more on pride than guilt.

My simpler explanation is that both on the left and the right, there are simply more opportunities to bite the hand that feeds you. I call this the supply-side explanation. I think the demand for complaining about the current state of affairs has always been there. People like to gripe about everything. I actually came up with something I call the Law of Conservation of Outrage in an earlier piece, which posits that, no matter how much progress society makes, the amount of complaining will always stay the same.

You say in the essay that anti-Western critics often like to pretend that their bravery will be met with universal outcry against them. But with a few exceptions, you note that these crusaders are not only given free reign but are also often handsomely rewarded.

Yeah, they are rewarded in specific contexts. So, in an academic environment, for example, you are rewarded for finding ever more novel ways to condemn Western civilization, and many of these anti-Western and anti-capitalist academics hold university positions that are paid for with tax money, which is basically the surplus production of the capitalist system that they criticize.

Can you talk about some examples of people who criticized their own societies, such as Edward Said and Michel Foucault?

Foucault is an interesting example. Early on, he was a member of the Communist Party, but he very quickly broke with communism. He was a postmodernist, so he didn’t believe in ideology or grand narratives. But he was biting the hand that feeds him in the sense that he was trying to demonize many of the institutions of modernity that we take as exemplars of moral progress.

I’m cutting some corners here, but Foucault’s argument always amounted to, “oh, so you think that we are so much better than we were in the Middle Ages?” In the Middle Ages, they were torturing criminals, but his argument was always that the modern way of treating prisoners or the mentally insane was actually even worse because although it presented itself as morally enlightened, it was really just a sinister bourgeois exercise of power to dominate the weak and vulnerable.

Foucault, of course, had unrestrained freedom to express his hatred of modernity, and he was rewarded by a lot of acolytes and followers who thought he was very brave to question the narrative of moral progress. Ironically, towards the end of his life, he contracted HIV and was treated in the Salpêtrière, which is a hospital in France that played a central role in Madness and Civilization,one of his major works. He bit the hand that feeds him, and the hand nurtured and comforted him until the end of his life.

Edward Said was one of the founders of post-colonialism, of this idea first expressed in his seminal work, Orientalism, that Western civilization, through the centuries, has always harbored a desire to oppress and invade the Orient. The intellectual groundwork for this conquest was laid by fiction and poetry, which, according to Said, presented the Orient as exotic, irrational, and sensual, in contrast with the rational, dominant, and masculine self-image of the West.

To be completely fair, there is some truth to what he wrote. It’s obviously true, especially if you go back centuries, that Western civilization had a very distorted view of other civilizations—just like every other culture in all of history. But Said was not interested in an even-handed or symmetric treatment of Western civilization; he was mostly interested in trashing the West.

The irony in Said’s case is that he studied in Princeton. He had guest professorships and distinguished chairs, and he got lots of awards for condemning Western civilization. Even in Israel, which he, in his later works, condemned as an oppressive, apartheid regime, he was welcomed. His books were published in Hebrew and put on university curricula.

Even more ironically, the opposite was true in the Palestinian-controlled territories. For a long time Said and Yasser Arafat had a friendship, but at some point, Arafat got fed up with Said and banned his books in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which were under Palestinian control. I think there’s no better example of the difference between a hand that punches back and the one that allows itself to be bitten.

Up until now, we’ve been talking about how critics of modernity often receive prestige and accolades. That’s a metaphorical “feeding,” but you also talk about literal feeding. Tell me about that.

In Rousseau’s time, the feeding was purely metaphorical. He lived before the Industrial Revolution, and people were still as poor as they had ever been. The literal feeding only began in the 19th century, and what you see is that the more people enjoy the fruits of a capitalist society, the more opportunities they have to engage in criticism. So, capitalism and industrial modernity become a victim of their own success because they breed this class of people who have their material needs met and can spend their lives biting the hand that feeds them. Karl Marx is a great example. He was living off of the handouts that he received from Friedrich Engels which were made possible by Engels’ father’s cotton factory. Capitalism was affording him the freedom and the material prosperity to write screeds against capitalism.

There was a recent study about how the hotspots of degrowth—the philosophy that calls for an end to economic growth and a controlled shrinking of material production—are all in wealthy countries. You don’t hear a lot of degrowth-ism from people in developing countries because they have a more immediate understanding of the benefits of capitalism and industry. But if you’ve been prosperous and well-fed and affluent for a long time, you tend to take those things for granted. If you read the degrowth literature, they seem to have no clue at all about what it means to farm, for example, and be self-sufficient. They romanticize it, and they can afford to romanticize it because nobody is there to tell them what it was like. Even their grandparents never experienced it.

You end the essay on the nuanced point that, in some way, we should be happy that there are so many critics of our civilization because it is a sign that freedom is still protected.

Yeah, absolutely. Perhaps because I’m an inveterate optimist, I try to put a positive spin on this kind of ungrateful, spoiled behavior. But it is a serious argument; I wouldn’t want to live in a society where people are afraid to speak up. However, I also believe that a society that engages in too much self-abasement and self-flagellation loses confidence in itself, and I worry about what that portends for the future. There are signs, especially in Europe, of technological and economic stagnation. And if you look back to earlier modern eras, there was a lot more confidence and optimism and a stronger belief in progress. I do think something has changed, and we no longer seem to believe in ourselves.

I can give you one example where I think this kind of wholesale rejection of industrial modernity is very harmful. Think about the way that people talk about fossil fuels in Western countries, how they’re destroying the planet, and we have to ween ourselves off as quickly as possible. It’s one thing for a Western activist who is surrounded by fossil fuel products to indulge in these fantasies, but Western environmentalists are also telling poor countries, “Oh, you shouldn’t repeat our mistakes,” meaning you shouldn’t burn all these fossil fuels and engaging in self-abasement, “we are so guilty because we have been doing that for two centuries.” That self-abasement leads them to actively sabotage fossil fuel development in poor countries. The IMF, the World Bank, and a lot of investment banks have openly promised not to fund fossil fuel investments in poor and developing countries. Not at home, mind you: they’re still building coal plants in Germany and gas plants in Norway. This virtue signaling mostly comes at the expense of poor and developing countries.

So, illusions have consequences. Perhaps not yet here because we’re surrounded by so much material affluence, but there are already downstream consequences on the other side of the globe.

The Human Progress Podcast | Ep. 63

Maarten Boudry: Why the West Turned on Itself

Maarten Boudry joins Chelsea Follett to examine the cultural and ideological roots of Western anti-Western sentiment.

Scoop | Women's Employment

Gender Gap Closes at Fastest Rate Since Pandemic

“The global gender gap has closed to 68.8%, marking the strongest annual advancement since the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet full parity remains 123 years away at current rates, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025, released today. Iceland leads the rankings for the 16th year running, followed by Finland, Norway, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.

The 19th edition of the report, which covers 148 economies, reveals both encouraging momentum and persistent structural barriers facing women worldwide. The progress made in this edition was driven primarily by significant strides in political empowerment and economic participation, while educational attainment and health and survival maintained near-parity levels above 95%. However, despite women representing 41.2% of the global workforce, a stark leadership gap persists with women holding only 28.8% of top leadership positions.”

From Scoop.

The Economist | Tolerance & Prejudice

The Stunning Decline of the Preference for Having Boys

“Without fanfare, something remarkable has happened. The noxious practice of aborting girls simply for being girls has become dramatically less common. It first became widespread in the late 1980s, as cheap ultrasound machines made it easy to determine the sex of a fetus. Parents who were desperate for a boy but did not want a large family—or, in China, were not allowed one—started routinely terminating females. Globally, among babies born in 2000, a staggering 1.6m girls were missing from the number you would expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. This year that number is likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.

The fading of boy preference in regions where it was strongest has been astonishingly rapid. The natural ratio is about 105 boy babies for every 100 girls; because boys are slightly more likely to die young, this leads to rough parity at reproductive age. The sex ratio at birth, once wildly skewed across Asia, has become more even. In China it fell from a peak of 117.8 boys per 100 girls in 2006 to 109.8 last year, and in India from 109.6 in 2010 to 106.8. In South Korea it is now completely back to normal, having been a shocking 115.7 in 1990.”

From The Economist.