Hacker News Reader

Comment by questime | Hacker News Reader

I don't completely understand how dowries are a thing - isn't there a massive gender imbalance in India, wouldn't dowries go the other way? Curious why this is not the case. This is awful.

View on HN

The very first anecdote has the women committing a particularly vicious killing (and being acquitted!) of an innocent woman because her dowry (which benefited the killers) was considered inadequate so there are some pretty powerful cultural forces at work here that are very difficult to grasp for the average HN reader. China also has a different sort of problem with a worse gender imbalance, giving us two terrible test cases from an outsider's point of view.

Dowry, the opposite of bride price, is a way to marry your daughter into a higher status family. Ours is an extremely status conscious society. For a bride family, it is like buying status. Dowry in its most obscene form is a richer India thing but poor seems to be copying a quite a lot of it. As a corollary, its mostly high caste, and cities and thing. Cities accounts to most dowry related deaths/murders though I am not very sure if underreporting has something to do with it.

In the last, it was mainly a north Indian thing but has successfully been imported by South as well especially Andhra.

People don't generally make decisions about their life by looking at the global scale, they do whatever is familiar to them from their upbringing and their friends and family. If you're used to the idea of dowry, and your potential marriage partner and their family is also used to it, then it's going to keep happening.

Religion, culture, social pressure, groupthink etc. all routinely trump basic economics in every society in the world.

True but economics can change culture.

In the Netherlands women are no longer entitled to their husbands money after a divorce. This forces women to maintain an effective career or be left behind in poverty. No more "stay at home" mom's. Sometimes you have to nudge people into freedom.

Is it strictly based on gender? I could see a stay at home father getting alimony if he sacrificed years of his career to raise the kids.

Why not? The whole point of the thing is that one of the parents might prefer to sacrifice their career, for some time, to care for the kids, and there's nothing wrong with that IMO. In case of divorce why wouldn't the sacrifice count? Or another scenario, one of the partners pursues a less financially rewarding field (say arts, or music, or teaching; or part time work to spend time with kids, volunteer work, hobbies, etc.) - in that case they'd always be at a massive disadvantage, which is just ripe for abuse. Daring to file for a divorce knowing it will put you in poverty overnight takes a lot of courage and things have to be really bad. Not saying one should finance their ex-partner's lifestyle forever, of course, but this is too much.

> Sometimes you have to nudge people into freedom.

I'm not sure it's freedom to force people to work at the threat of destitution.

Traditions are very hard to break.

Goes to show that supply and demand theory doesn't really work in practice.

Or that it does. There is a limited supply of highly successful men.

Success measured how? There seems to be a limited supply of decent men so it seems.

Gender balance is more like clean air than like butter. Most people will benefit from it, but individual rational choices work in the opposite direction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com