A tipster notifies us that Miss Indiana, who appears at the Miss USA pageant that is on NBC tonight, is an Indian American woman by the name of Courtni Shabana Hall (more pictures here):
Courtni Hall, a 5’5″ brown eyed brunette, is the 22-year-old daughter of Barbara Hall of Crawfordsville. A senior at Indiana State University, Courtni’s career ambition is to obtain her Masters degree in Communications and to work in the entertainment industry as a television personality. Courtni is a spokesperson for Children’s Hope International and serves as an advocate for adoption, as she was adopted from India at just five months old. Her hobbies include singing, traveling, acting and volunteering as a Spanish tutor. [Link]
Her profile at NBC’s website has a bit more concerning her adoption and a few of her interests:
* Born in Calcutta, India weighing only 2 lbs., 2 oz., she was abandoned at birth, and adopted by U.S. parents and brought to Indiana.
* Working towards getting her pilot’s license.
* Has a beaver, 56 tigers and a pet alligator. [Link]
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p>Mad respect to anyone working toward their pilot’s licence because I appreciate the commitment that takes. However, I am a bit concerned about the 56 tigers and the pet alligator (owning a beaver is probably not as dangerous and I think is fairly common in some parts).
In case you want to “friend” Courtni or become a fan, her FB page is here.
I for one will be tuning in and keeping my fingers crossed for the gorgeous Courtni (who speaks so well), and perhaps I shall follow along in the Twittervesre.
Hey, did you know what the meaning of studies which control for income and education levels? Don’t let that stop your theorizing though.
umm.. this is the point of razib’s comment. male infants at birth have a higher mortality than female infants. again, do not let this detail get in the way of your theorizing and relying on self affirming rationalizations of protection from rape and prostitution by abandonment.
Yoga Fire, I don’t get your points. Conrad is saying that more girls than boys are abandoned or given up for adoption in India and you are saying what exactly? “no! that’s not true. how dare you say such a thing”, OR “yes! that is true. and here are the reasons why”.
Seems like at first you were saying the first and then, once Conrad informed you that he has worked in Indian orphanage and observed the pattern, you then switched to “OK but here are the reasons why”.
Of course there are going to be reasons! Does that make it OK?
But for Courtni it was probably the best thing that could’ve have happened to her at the time, seeing where it got her.
I just hope all baby girls meet with such a similar good fate.
Proximate and distal causes.
To analogize, I live in a predominantly Black neighborhood and I have security bars on my doors. Does that mean I have security bars because I distrust Black people or is it that urban neighborhoods that are predominantly Black tend to have higher rates of burglary?
Do these neighborhoods have higher rates of burglary because Black people are more prone to being burglars or is a higher rate of burglary just what you expect when you subject a neighborhood to pervasive institutional neglect, fail to build proper schools, and fail to generate adequate employment for the people there?
See my point? Saying “Black people have no respect for my property” is a crude generalization and saying “White people who live in these neighborhoods don’t trust Black people” is also a crude generalization. Both of them miss the point completely because they rely on oversimplifications that are so common that they become cliches. And once you get there people stop actually trying to address the root of the problem and resort, instead, to jumping up on a high horse and judging.
Yes, because endogeneity isn’t a serious problem there. It’s not like education and income controls aren’t intimately connected to each other and have vague interactions with a whole series of intangible and unmeasurable effects no sir.
Mortality =/= Morbidity smarty. There is a difference between how people respond to major health shocks and how they respond to chronic health conditions. Of course, there be no room for uncertainty in your world-view. Let’s just go with whatever the NGO du jour tells us to think. Questioning assertions and coming up with conclusions for ourselves is for suckers natch.
yes, keep arguing with the facts because THE TRUTH will win!
“i refuse to accept these findings because it is more convenient for me not to. let me come up with some gobbledygook $10 words instead!”
yes, let’s accuse my interest in this as faddish and call me a sheep. it’s certainly easier than dealing with the fact that every study that focus on a variety of income and education levels, and across a variety of states establishes the discrimination at birth in india.
Do you want a politically correct liberal answer? Ask a white person.
If you want the real, raw and politically incorrect truth. Ask a black person.
Similarly, we can try to give a politically correct glazed coating to the issue of girl neglect and abandonement in India. Best thing though is to ask the people who are doing the neglect and abandoning why they do it.
They will give you real, raw and politically incorrect truth.
Well this is certainly a convenient line of argument. Dismiss any criticism of your bad logic by refusing to understand what it means. Statistical models have no limitations! Let us trust them blindly and without question!
Funny from someone who just said: “yes, keep arguing with the facts because THE TRUTH will win!” Let’s just claim assertions are facts without actual evidence. Very persuasive.
So, who is winning the pissing contest?
Actually, there is a MASSIVE literature as to why there are these differences and they exist within India as well; one can easily observe this in the differing sex ratios that exist in different Indian states; there is a large and growing North-South divide on this. Certain regions like Western UP, Punjab and Haryana do particularly badly on this score. But this isn’t just confined to India; parts of Indonesia like northern Aceh and South Korea exhibit the same problem. LAnd ownership and inheritance laws, alongside female literacy and life expectancy play an important role in a relationship marked out by well noted scholars like Amartya Sen and Ashis Bose. Financial incentives are not going to help as the case of South Korea shows, these imbalances as far as sex-selective birth rates go are not determined purely by income levels.
I just want to add that my comments are more based on empirical research work undertaken by a wide range of scholars. The discrimination against girl-children has little to do with the farcical factors that Yoga Fire has cited; perusal of Indian census data and the NFHS provide a wealth of material on this and there are at least two excellent demographic works on the topic by Tim Dyson and Amit Barua (no relation). Barua’s work is particularly interesting because he tracks morbidity rates across different regions and more iinterestingly across different religious communities and finds that rates vary for female children. Why exactly this is so, is a matter of debate and further research. There are also numerous studies and survey’s on the disparity of medical treatment given out to boy and girl children and the gap is so large, you would have to be a complete moron to think they have some natural cause.
I simply made the point about working in orphanages because in the several years that I and my family have been involved with organisations that do this work, I have NEVER come across any making the absurdist arguements of Yoga Fire. Admittedly, this experience is confined basically to the north Indian Hindi belt; so things might be different elsewhere; especially in the South where the environment seems to be different.
Yeah, this is the internent so we can’t ask for proof of anything but one way to deal with this is to take what people say at face value, since otherwise we can just query everything that we don’t like and dismiss it. My experience doesn’t make me an authority and there are plenty of debates to be had within those who work in the social sector and demographics on this subject but it does mean I don’t need to listen to condescending lectures from individuals who post behind webonyms but feel they know enough to make comments about other people’s intentions, malafide or not and their views..
if you actually took the trouble to find the wealth of evidence in published papers with transparent methodology and data, instead of indulging in evidence free speculation and apologia, I might think there was some value in providing these papers to you.
There was this commercial on TV that showed Ma giving milk to beta but not to beti. The message was – give milk to your daughters too, they also need nutrition and nourishment.
Ironically, not long after that commercial aired, there was an epidemic of little boys dying due to drinking milk from copper vessels (deadly chem combo). No girls died, of course.
So that particular form of penis bias ended up working in favor of our little girls.
The bias does not begin and end with the birth of a male or female infant. Girls that are born, kept, raised and educated by their families will experience bias from them throughout their lives. The whole system is set up that way.
There are reasons for everything of course – biological, psychological, socialogical, cultural, financial, etc. That doesn’t make it hurt any less.
king kong,
Arguing that the papers are correct because they’re “published papers with transparent methodology and data” is another form of fallacious reasoning.
The fact of the matter is that Yoga Fire brings up a good point, at least from a statistical perspective: endogeneity is always an issue with these sorts of models. This is not really revelatory or that earth shattering– it’s something everyone who does some applied statistics learns to deal with at a very early stage of learning.
How about I ask both, independently verify their factual claims, and look into the broader context in which their claims are being made to determine why they’re thinking the way they’re thinking. Doesn’t that bring me closer to the truth than the biased accounts you would get from one or another?
It’s a bit patronizing to say that a Black person, simply by virtue of being Black, is going to really understand an issue. They’re human just like the White guy. They are limited in what they know.
First of all the people doing the neglect generally know they are doing something bad and, as a result, will justify their answer any way they can. That’s not going to give you a “true” answer. With that caveat in mind, from the explanations I’ve seen the primary concerns are financial and the difficulty of having to protect them. It is almost always done by families who have no previous sons and already have at least one daughter.
Presumably, since it is expected that sons look after parents in adulthood they keep trying until they have one and each girl along the way becomes increasingly costly. I did see one interesting case study on China where they found that people with pensions were much more likely to have daughters. More interestingly the study determined that sons are valued because they can get married and bring daughters in law into the family that can provide support in the household in old-age. But it was by economists so I advice you to take any claims they make on sociology with a grain of salt.
JAH, Yoga Fire agrees with Conrad and King Kong. There is no denying that there is a very clear, sharp and defined bias towards male children (and male adults) in India. Nobody can or will deny that. (If anything they will celebrate it and do all they can to keep the wheel turning).
He’s just trying to justify it, which I think is abhorant.
I say we need to adopt a zero tolerance policy, the same kind that is adopted against peodophiles. Afterall, peodophiles often have their “reasons” too, some of which are medical like legal insanity. Still, zero tolerance policy is in effect.
Really? The idea that people are rational actors who take economic factors into account when making decisions is both unparalleled and absurd to you? Really?
Yog Tej,
Why is it abhorrent? Given that the people most likely to try to “select” for a male child live in situations where survival can sometimes be tipped based on the sex of a child, is it really truly abhorrent to try to maximize one’s chances?
Most of us live in societies where female children can, thanks to modern economies, provide us with comfortable retirements. Or, if we’re really lucky, we can retire after saving (assuming we have a 401K left)!
Besides, isn’t calling them the equivalent of a pedophile essentially just argumentum ad Hitler in a different form?
no, that is not what i said, or even remotely close. the data and methodology is there, contradict it and come up with comparable analyses to make your point if you think they are wrong. endogeneity is well known to applied statisticians as you say, those who did the analysis are also fully capable of engaging with it.
The fact that we use draconian punishments on pedophiles and haven’t actually reduced the number of pedophiles out there might indicate that maybe the strategy doesn’t work?
NO! Easier to get on a moralizing high-horse than to actually solve problems.
the justifications are wrong as studies that control for income and education have shown in india. the refusal to accept those studies and rely on apologist explanations as crutches is abhorrent.
Getting boring in the ole echo chamber, yaar.
So, did anyone see Courtni do her thing in the finale of the Ultimate Beauty Deathmatch?
Seems wonderfully ironic that the result of the (likely probable) sex discrimination in India that led to her American adoption is the opportunity to trade on her womanly good looks here in the Land of the Free, etc.
Erm, leave aside the fact that people are supposedly “rational actors” itself a fallacy promoted by mainly by economists and those gullible enough to beleive them; I don’t dispute the fact that economic factors play an important role in son preference across South and East Asia, though it isn’t enough to explain things by itself since we have seen such patterns change both over time and within countries, in response to non-economic factors. What I would say is that the economy cannot be divorced from scoiety so simplisticially and structural factors shape the latter to make certain outcomes anything but gender neutral.
king kong,
You miss the point. Endogeneity is not an issue that can be “solved.†Endogeneity is a feature of the system you’re trying to model. Let me use an example: supply and demand. “The price is endogenous because producers change their price in response to demand and consumers change their demand in response to price.†This is not something you can control for in a model, and even though nearly all social scientists should know about it, is commonly ignored.
One of the great fallacies of dealing with academic reports is that if a report is flawed, you must supply another, “less-flawed†report to be able to criticize the flawed one. This is false. Problems with statistical models are problems no matter what the alternative models say.
If I tried to pass a paper through peer review by saying “no other papers contradict me†but I had a terrible issue with methodology I would still (hopefully) not pass.
and the same was true of the papers that passed. so this objection does not hold.
Conrad,
Yes, rational choice is flawed, as Sen is so quick to point out, but it’s still a better framework than “people don’t really care about maximizing utility” or “no framework needed.”
While culture probably DOES play a role, we seem wont to forget that other cultures worldwide have had plenty of “women issues” that good ol’ economic growth seems to reduce. As if by magic.
Not true. You need to understand the concept of controlling for variables.
king kong,
No, it’s not that simple. You can sometimes control using instrumental variables or fancy techniques like Heckman correction, but a model with severe endogeneity issues will almost universally have biased coefficients. Throwing in more variable controls will just lead to overspecification.
“and the same was true of the papers that passed. so this objection does not hold.”
So if the papers that passed peer review still have serious methodological issues we can’t criticize them on their own merits?
The person above is me, not king kong. My apologies. I accidentally typed “king kong” in the name field.
Yes, those studies which you haven’t bothered to reference. At least Conrad came through for you on that. You should thank him.
What this comes down to is whether you think that human being are rational actors who make their decisions based on calculations of economic well-being or if you’re going to sit here and tell me that these parents are just going to smother their daughters for giggles. If it’s the former there are actually things we can do about it. If you’re going to argue the latter then it’s just too far from reality to bother discussing.
As for Conrad’s post, you can’t just dismiss South Korea’s economic incentives. I explain again that culture is not exogamous. Cultural norms develop to work around economic constraints, but they lag. The Korean economy took off like a shot over just 10 to 20 years. It takes a while for norms to change after the substructure has shifted. On top of that, since a lot of child-rearing concerns are about being taken care of in old-age, that means you have 10 to 20 years (at least) before you even see the effects of these things start to show up. And despite what King Kong thinks, there is no reliable way to control for income unless you can do a household level survey, and being as how this is an underground phenomenon that people are unlikely to cop to you’re not going to get unbiased numbers even with that. So it is not unimaginable that the effect of income and education would be understated in any statistical model. That doesn’t mean they’re not there, it just means the study didn’t capture it.
Anyone who thinks the clear and well defined bias for males and against females in India ends when a wealthy couple raise an educated, professional daughter capable of providing for and taking care of them in their old age, is just laughably mistaken.
Beyond the financial and other external factors, there are subtle yet powerful cultural and psychological factors at play that are just as real as anything else.
of course you can. read my comment 67 where i said exactly this. however, providing ass backwards rationalizations and apologia that contradict actual empirical evidence does not count for a reasonable criticism. Serious critiques would actually engage with these papers and the data they provide.
comment #76 is not by king kong by the way.
as i said, i am not interested in doing your work for you.
That’s just it. Culture plays a role but even culture has been shaped to be the way it is because of economic and political constraints. It just takes longer to shift. So in some cases you will still see the ‘old vays’ continue for another generation or so (probably a little less) before they match up to incentives.
what this comes down to is your not reducing the arguments to strawmen. there is strong empirical evidence that there is a cultural bias against women that transcends the lower economic and educational strata. to claim that parents abandon their helpless girl infants because they are worried that the cannot be protected from rape and prostitution is preposterous. not to mention ridiculous.
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blockquote>there is strong empirical evidence that there is a cultural bias against women that transcends the lower economic and educational strata.
Where? Don’t give me that “I’m not doing your work for you” business. I know how that game goes. I critique an article and you say “I didn’t mean that one, I meant these other ones,” and then “No, not that one, those over there.” If you have a study to prove your point, provide it. The onus of proving a claim generally falls on the one making it no? I’m not going to take on blind faith that the evidence is there and the evidence is good because you said so. Of the ones I have seen I remain unconvinced because I don’t think the models have been sound for the aforementioned reasons. You can keep claiming they’re “facts” if you want but repeating yourself doesn’t make it any more true.
king kong,
You’re right that it’s not you. I already stated that.
By the way, post #76 is me. 😉
Anyway, we can get further into statistical issues that plague most models like this one. The fact of the matter remains that no matter how many fancy mathematical controls you put into place, there remain many serious statistical issues with models of this type. Never mind that “statistical significance†is a meaningless and easily attainable measure of model skill.
Now, it’s true that culture plays a role, but to say it’s X% is dangerous, because it’s nearly impossible to tell. What we should be interested in, more than anything, is how other cultures with “anti-female†biases fared after modernization.
Exactly!
As if abandoning a child is not going to possibly expose her to even greater risks than rape and prostitution further down the line.
I really don’t think these parents are thinking about how to protect their baby when they abandon her.
If you need statistics to believe that there is a bias for males and against females in India, you must not be desi.
To hell with stats. I’ve lived it. My entire family has lived it. The entire block, neighborhood, town has and is living it!
You are just arguing now for the sake of arguing.
I rest my case. Exhibit A.
I always thought the point of abandoning them was to refuse to take responsibility for them. Hence, she doesn’t WANT to have to protect the kid so she doesn’t. At all.
It’s also interesting that you’ve all settled on 1 of the 3 or 4 underlying causes I mentioned and pretty much ignore the rest of them despite the fact that I pointed out that they all work together to make raising a girl more costly.
What I need statistics to prove is that economic factors aren’t the primary motivators behind it.
r e a d.
g o o g l e. i do not expect citations every time somebody claims that the earth revolves around the sun. if i question the claim, i can google it.
sure. if you close your eyes and wish hard enough, it will be true.
How many desis does it take to take a topic like Hawt Beauty Queens, and make it a discussion about empircal evidence of economic rationality?
Three.
How is any of the above related to this post?
Anyone know how she did?
Anyone see her in action?
No intense debating if you have to end your thought by addressing Street Fighter characters and giant apes.
“So you see, YOGA FIRE” “In conclusion, KING KONG” “My evidence I have just shared with you completely nullifies JUST ANOTHER HACK’S”
That’s a good thing. At least it did not degenerate into a convo about the merits or demerits of her figure, or lewd comments about sex such as “I’d hit that”, like it would have before.
Sepia men have truly evolved.
Well, the “I’d hit that” comments are tasteless but. . . it’s a beauty contest. Unless she pulls a Mrs. South Carolina what else would we talk about?
Really just 2. In fact, I could probably have this argument with myself if necessary. 😉
Just because I didn’t SAY it doesn’t mean that I’m not THINKING it.
I am a being of urges, after all. 😉
Since Ms. Hall was given up for adoption as child in Calcutta, India , it’s a good guess that more then likely she came from a lower caste. I wonder how the desi auntie types in America would feel if there son would be in relationship with her. The sad thing is more then a few would not aprove of her possible low caste background.
Since Ms. Hall was given up for adoption as child in Calcutta, India , it’s a good guess that more then likely she came from a lower caste. I wonder how the desi auntie types in America would feel if there son would be in relationship with her. The sad thing is more then a few would not aprove of her possible low caste background.
Very uneducated speculation, no surprise there.
Adoption happens for thousand (hazaar) reasons in India: out of wedlock child, pure economics (poor people come in all castes and religion, and they are lot of them in India), broken relationships, even scams (where the mother is totally unaware of her baby given away) ……..etc, etc. It has nothing to do with caste at all.
I would rather not speculate like a fool, Who knows………..She is quite pretty, and more power to her on coming this far.
Rational choice isn’t so much as flawed as just stupid; all other social scientists have realised this except for economists. Rationality is a useful tool in examining human behaviour but it is just one aspect of it.
Re the debates about income etc. the problem is that it isn’t necessarily the more well off states or segments of the population that suffer from an adverse sex ratio – which is the one element of sex dsicrimination for which there is the most data available. Generally speaking in so far as the data tell us anything; those groups and regions which have seen sustained economic growth tend to be accompanied by a worsening sex ratio. South India is a discrepancy here because, I would think higher famel literacy and schooling which really is a key variable – but even here sex ratios have been moving in an adverse direction, ironically in urban and peri-urban areas. It is difficult to draw any strong conclusions from this but the beleif that rising income will cause sex ratios to adjust through some sort of invisible hand mechanism is not tenable imo.
Exactly!