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Family planning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

A. C. Paseau
A. C. Paseau*
Affiliation:
Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PN e-mail:alexander.paseau@wadh.ox.ac. uk
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Extract

Without doing the morally unspeakable or the medically infeasible, can a preference for daughters rather than sons increase their relative number? If, to be more precise, the only variable over which you have control is your number of children, can you increase the ratio.

Expected value (no. of daughters) : Expected value (no. of sons) ? Naïvely, you might think so. If for example you adopt the policy ‘stop procreating as soon as a girl is born’ won't you bear more girls compared to boys than you would otherwise? No, in fact.

Type
Articles
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 95 , Issue 533 , July 2011 , pp. 213 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © The Mathematical Association 2012

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