Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 November 1

= November 1 =

President of the Board of Health of the Kingdom of Hawaii
Can someone help me find a list of the President of the Board of Health of the Kingdom of Hawaii? The Board was established in the year 1850.--KAVEBEAR (talk) 02:10, 1 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Not having any luck with a list but Sumário, Adolpho Lutz (pp. 158-159) says that Walter M. Gibson was Minister of Foreign Relations and President of the Board of Health in 1887, and Hanseníase, Adolpho Lutz (p. 369) says that Dr J H Kimball was President of the Board of Health of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1890. Alansplodge (talk) 13:57, 2 November 2016 (UTC)


 * worldstatesmen.org has a list from 1850 to 1900. I have no idea how reliable it is. "HAWAII (TER) BOARD OF HEALTH" in Index to the Honolulu Advertiser & Star-Bulletin, 1929-1969 has some potential matches for that period. jnestorius(talk) 14:06, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Surplus males and surplus females = population interchange
We have an article on List of countries by sex ratio. As you can see from the chart, some areas, such as India, China, and South Korea, have a high number of surplus males or marriageable age, who will inevitably find themselves without local wives. On the other side of the equation, we have Russia and Eastern Europe, with a significant number of surplus females (although interestingly, the top three countries with excess females in the 15-64 age group are all African). Likewise, many African-American women find it hard to find a husband, as so many young men of their own race are behind bars. In any case, my question is, wouldn't we logically expect to see a population movement between these two areas (those with surplus males, vs those with surplus females, each looking for a partner of the opposite sex)? I do understand that it would be a culture shock for an Indian or Chinese man to marry a girl from Djibouti or Eastern Europe, but given that the alternative may be no partner at all, wouldn't we expect to see at least some of the people in this situation try to find a partner of a different race from a country where the sex ratio is skewed opposite to theirs? Has this happened to any significant extent? And if not, why not? 110.140.69.137 (talk) 12:43, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
 * There's no official government policy along this way, but there are some organic market-based solutions that have sprung up on their own. See Mail-order bride.  You'll notice that many such women come from eastern Europe.  Even if not explicitly for marriage, there are many programs to move young women out of countries where there is a surplus of them; in many cases women from these countries make up a significant portion of foreign au pairs for example.  -- Jayron 32 13:09, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
 * This is because human beings are human and not machines. The best reference I can give you is human behaviour but honestly, I think you can probably answer your own question without sources. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 13:11, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Or, because a country with a large surplus of men has a large corps of potential soldiers with no family obligations, maybe this is working as intended. --Golbez (talk) 15:33, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Soldiers without family have less to die for. --Error (talk) 17:06, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
 * They also have fewer/no dependents to discourage them from risking dying. (As a completely OR guess - I suspect that soldiers having a families would be an advantage in a defensive war or allegedly defensive war ("Join up and save your families from the depredations of the Hun!"), while unattached soldiers would be better if you want to launch an aggressive war of conquest or plunder).Iapetus (talk) 18:27, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Besides Japan foreign marriage with 16 links under References, here's an article published in the New York Times in mid-2002 on Japanese men seeking foreign brides. If you search the web, try including the name of a source you trust to avoid getting "mail-order brides" sites. This topic might also be covered by academic research in the fields of Sociology and Cultural Anthropology.-- Deborahjay (talk) 16:35, 1 November 2016 (UTC)


 * The imbalances affect poor people most, who can't appear as desirable matches. Hence they can't afford to emigrate. Besides, there is significant male emigration from China and India but I doubt their main reason is getting married. I'd say that, if successful, they bring compatriots to marry to. --Error (talk) 17:06, 1 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Maybe not putting quite as many black males in prison might help balance the ratio in the US? Rgds ✦  hugarheimur 21:49, 1 November 2016 (UTC)


 * I am reminded of hearing an African-American argue that we need to "close the gap between white and black life expectancy", which would be satisfied by making whites die earlier to match blacks. So, using that same logic, another solution to the black gender-inequality would be to jail more black women. StuRat (talk) 22:16, 1 November 2016 (UTC)


 * What is the track record for convicted felons becoming desirable as husbands and fathers? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:44, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
 * See History of Australia. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 22:49, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
 * (ec) @Baseball Bugs: if you don’t convict people then they don’t become convicted felons, which is kind of the point. Cheers ✦  hugarheimur 00:13, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * If people don't break the law, they are less likely to become convicted felons. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:57, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Good point. I'm sure Kim Jong-un agrees. Nil Einne (talk) 07:05, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * As far as I know, Kim has never incarcerated anyone into an American prison. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 07:20, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * What's that got to do with anything? The point is if people complain about the unjustness of North Korea society because people are locked up for reasons most of the world consider fundamentally wrong, he often has the same excuse. These people wouldn't be locked up if they didn't commit crimes. Practically of course the justice system in North Korea is so unfair that a fair few people haven't even committed the crime they were accused of, or at least there wasn't sufficient evidence to lock them up to a standard any decent society expects. But that is also true of the US to a less degree. Note I chose North Korea, rather than say Nazi Germany for a reason. North Korea does appear to punish whole families which is different from your point (since in these cases someone else has committed the crime) but for various reasons they don't seem to have so much of a level of punishing people for just being, like the Nazis (Jewish people etc) and some others did which again is a point the US does have in their favour. Although it gets complicated. If you stop and frisk a black person just for being black, and some of them respond in way you don't like which you then use to likewise respond in a way you may not have done so if the person wasn't black but which ultimately results in the person being imprisoned, you have to some extent locked the person up just for being black. Nil Einne (talk) 01:19, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
 * You brought up Kim. But it's apples and oranges. The entire country of North Korea is effectively a prison. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:22, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
 * It's not apples and oranges. If your defense of unjust laws, unjust sentences, selective enforcement of the law etc etc is that people should just not commit crimes, then the same could be said for North Korea, or any other country of the ilk. This doesn't mean that the US is anywhere as bad as North Korea. In fact it may be that there is nothing wrong with the system in the US. However you can only know that by actually looking at the laws and how they are enforced. Not by simply saying "don't break the law" which was all you basically said in the response I replied to. Otherwise any horrific regime can equally say "don't break the law". It's true this doesn't apply certain parts of the North Korean law, or that of other brutal regimes i.e. cases where you can't actually not break the law (cases when you are punished for actions of family members, or because of who you are such as being of Jewish descent are obvious ones) but that's about it. Nil Einne (talk) 13:59, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Also on point, if you don't write unjust laws, then people cannot break them... -- Jayron 32 12:21, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * I know Americans probably don’t want to hear this (especially coming from a German – it’s not as if we don’t have problems of our own ...), but your justice system is seriously flawed. Also, the systemic (often but not always racial) discrimination certainly doesn’t help. Rgds ✦  hugarheimur 18:46, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * What percentage of convicted criminals in America did not actually commit the crimes they were accused of? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:36, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Probably more than enough (although some of them seem to get themselves shot before they can be put before a court of law ...), but that’s not the point, really.
 * The question is why there are so much more criminals in the US than in any other country, and why a disproportionate number of them seem to be black guys. Cheers ✦  hugarheimur 23:48, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * The question wasn't about race. People of all races can be criminals. Like the white guy who was just arrested for ambushing a couple of white cops. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:32, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
 * How can it not be about race when the comment you replied to which started this was "Maybe not putting quite as many black males in prison"? And who ever denies that people of all races can be criminals? The point is that black people in the US are much more likely to be convicted felons in the US. And there's evidence they're more likely to be convicted felons if they are criminals than white people, and more likely to be convicted felons if they aren't criminals (at least of the crime they were accused of). Also, as Jayron32 and I have mentioned, if laws are unjust and make people criminals and convicted felons even if they shouldn't be, this can become about race when for various reasons people of a certain race are much more likely to be affected by these unjust laws. Nil Einne (talk) 01:22, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
 * What specific laws are you complaining about? And it's often the case that low-income persons of any race may be more tempted to engage in criminal behavior. But it's still their choice. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:25, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Baseball Bugs, take the law that says that use of crack cocaine (popular with often-poor blacks) is punished far more harshly than use of powdered cocaine (popular with whites, particularly white celebrities). To put someone in jail for six years (that's the federal sentencing guideline - admittedly, state laws may vary for those prosecuted at the state level, but crack is still often punished far harsher than powdered) merely for using crack cocaine, whilst the white celebrity who snorts powdered cocaine gets a far more lenient sentence (one year maybe?), if, in practice (s)he gets prosecuted at all. Is there not in practice a racist element, and possibly a class element, to this law? The poor black man who uses cocaine is given a crushing sentence, whilst the white celebrity who snorts cocaine is treated with kid gloves. If we started aggressively identifying, prosecuting, and convicting white celebrities who snort cocaine, and sentencing each of them to six years' jail, I think they would finally get a taste of the way poor black drug users are treated. In general, there are issues with a huge number of blacks locked up for long sentences (far longer than any other western democracy) for non-violent crimes such as drug use (not trafficking), though the issue of extreme sentences does admittedly affect whites too. 110.140.69.137 (talk) 12:54, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, there's inequity there. But surely that fact is known to the drug users, yet they still choose to do so. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:05, 4 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Sex imbalances in the population have often led to creative matrimonial solutions. Bride kidnapping is still surprisingly widespread, for example. Recently a Chinese economist suggested letting men share a wife, i.e. polyandry. Rural Chinese men have turned to foreign, especially Vietnamese, brides. "These years, many single men in rural China have looked for wives in Vietnam, paying a substantial fee to marriage agents. The risk is that it may involve human trafficking or fraud. Yet more people are doing it."  (Re a comment above: note that au pairs are meant to return home after a year or so. They may not all do so, of course.) There are historical precedents for organised gender-based emigration/immigration, from the Filles du roi of New France (Quebec) to the many Victorian societies to deal with the "surplus" women of Britain. (Great names: the Colonial Intelligence League, the Female Middle Class Emigration Society, the South African Colonisation Society, the Society for Overseas Settlement of British Women.)  Carbon Caryatid (talk) 00:08, 2 November 2016 (UTC)


 * (OP here) Error makes an excellent point above that the poor people (being less desirable matches) are the worst affected, and the poor can't afford to emigrate. Possibly the best response to this question of all. The question is how to overcome this problem. Assuming a system could be designed where even the poor have access to quality education (including tertiary education - a big "if"), I could possibly imagine those countries (either government or private enterprise or a public-private partnership) with a surplus of women sponsoring the immigration of Indian men, for example, to work in those fields where the Indians have a surplus of talented workers (e.g. Information Technology and possibly Accounting), and the recipient country (such as many in Eastern Europe) has a skills deficit. Even poor countries need tech and communications systems these days, and this is an area where both the Indians and the South Koreans are strong. Could this work?
 * Also, if you're a poor Indian man of marriageable age, wouldn't your chances be drastically improved if you and your parents agreed to totally forego a dowry from the girl's family? Or would you still find it difficult? 110.140.69.137 (talk) 13:50, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * (speculation) I would think that one "market based solution" could be via bisexuality, which gives some people a choice of which sex to pursue - but I don't have any notion of how much of an effect this has on the total sex imbalance in practice, and obviously it wouldn't eliminate it completely (since the imbalance has to exist in order for this to affect it). Other things like monkdom and Internet porn might have something of the same effect...  Wnt (talk) 00:55, 7 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Why does China have a surplus of males?  Because baby girls are killed at birth.   What is needed is not interchange but education. 80.44.161.39 (talk) 12:07, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Baby girls are either killed at birth, or before birth (sex-selective abortion). But China had a particular problem due to its idiotically constructed One-child policy. If a couple could only have one child, they were desperate for the child to be a boy, which would carry on the family name, and support them in their old age - two things a girl couldn't do. I do speculate if China had introduced a different policy, allowing couples to go on having child after child until they had a boy (so if your first 3 kids were girls, you could have a fourth, but if that one was a boy, you'd then need to stop), if they would have such a serious sex imbalance today. The government did at some point somewhat relax the policy towards this end - if your first child was a girl, you were allowed a second. But that will only bring minor relief compared to my proposal. Now the one-child policy has been universally replaced with a two-child policy, but the problem remains. Eliyohub (talk) 13:56, 7 November 2016 (UTC)