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Liron comments on A speculation on Near and Far Modes - Less Wrong
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Even if there were a huge tragedy of the commons at work (and there really isn't, since I'm sure a lot of Chinese parents wish they had had a girl in light of the current sexual marketplace)...
...it's still a rationality fail to thwart your own preferences for the sake of adhering to sound group-level behavioral policy if there is no logical connection between your actions and the degree to which others adhere to the group-level policy.
If your brain is running a rational decision algorithm for picking child sex, then it shouldn't even be raising this kind of irrelevant point. No one bothers to cleverly debate the group-level dynamics of amazon.com purchase decisions.
Citation really needed here. I understand that this would be the case if there were an efficient and fungible market in romance in modern China and if parents' incentives aligned with their future child's. But neither of those strike me as remotely true, and on the other hand raising a girl in a society of mostly men could be more costly and anxiety-inducing than raising a boy.
I inferred my claim from the premises:
It's quite possible that parents would in retrospect, 20 years later, regret picking a boy over a girl, if so does everyone else. However, given that the sex imbalance persists in Chinese kids born now (whose parents are aware of the gender imbalance, but are perhaps overconfident due to survivorship bias† or focused on other factors), I'd say that a tragedy of the commons is quite possible. If the technology were cheap and universally available, I suspect you'd see something like 3 boys to every girl.
† That is, of course their little boy will successfully find a wife when the time comes, just like his daddy did!