The Educational Attainment of Americans Before 1850

It is widely assumed that few Americans prior to 1850 and the development of government-run school systems were capable of reading and that knowledge was sparsely distributed.  This is a myth which there is much evidence to refute.

Here is an excerpt from an article by Andrew Berstein which was published in The Objective Standard, Vol. 5, No. 4 (2010) under the title The Educational Bonanza in Privatizing Government Schools.

Prior to the mid-19th century, government schools did not exist in America. All schools were private, and education was widespread and outstanding. For example, in the Middle Atlantic colonies during the pre-Revolutionary period, professional educators established numerous schools to satisfy the demand for education.15 Philadelphia, for instance, boasted schools for every subject and interest. Between 1740 and 1776, 125 private schoolmasters advertised their services in Philadelphia newspapers—this in a city whose population was miniscule relative to today. Professional educators provided mentoring services in English, contemporary foreign languages, science, and a wide variety of other topics.16 Children who grew to be such brilliant scientists, writers, and statesmen as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington received their education at home or in private schools.

(As to higher education, by the late-18th century six private colleges operated in the colonies: Yale, the College of New Jersey [Princeton], the College of Philadelphia [Penn], Dartmouth, Queen’s [Rutgers], and Rhode Island College [Brown].)17

Predictably, the educational results of such a free educational market were superb. The literacy levels of Revolutionary America were remarkably high. For example, Thomas Paine’s book, Common Sense,written in plain style but enunciating sophisticated political principles, sold 120,000 copies during the colonial period to a free population of 2.4 million (akin to selling 10 million copies today).18 The essays of The Federalist, written by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay in support of a Constitution for the nascent republic, were largely newspaper editorials written for and read by the common man.

Sales of American books and educational materials in the early- and mid-19th century likewise indicate a high national literacy rate. Between 1818 and 1823, while the U.S. population was under 20 million, Walter Scott’s novels sold 5 million copies (the equivalent of selling 60 million [actually more than 77.5 million] copies today). Early in the 19th century, The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper likewise sold millions of copies.19 The McGuffey’s Readers, first published in 1836, routinely used such terms as “heath” and “benighted” in third-grade texts. They asked such questions as “What is this species of composition called?” and gave such assignments as “Relate the facts of this dialogue.” The fourth-grade reader included selections from Hawthorne, and the fifth-grade text, readings from Shakespeare. “These were not the textbooks of the elite but of the masses,” explains Thomas Sowell. “[F]rom 1836 to 1920, McGuffey’s Readers were so widely used that they sold more than 122 million copies.”20

Given the high quality of education in early America, it is no surprise that two renowned French visitors observed and reported on the phenomenon. In an 1800 book Vice President Thomas Jefferson commissioned, titled National Education in the United States of America, Pierre Du Pont de Nemours reported that Americans received an education far superior to that of other peoples. “Most young Americans,” he wrote, “can read, write, and cipher. Not more than four in a thousand are unable to write legibly.”21 Several decades later, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that Americans were the most educated people of history.22

The bracketed text in red is my correction.  Footnote 17 explains that Harvard College, King's College in New York City (now Columbia University), and William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia, which are all private colleges now, were founded by governments.  Harvard was founded by the Massachusetts Bay Colony and King's and William and Mary Colleges were founded under Royal Charters in the colonial period.  It is clear that the 1800 book Vice President Thomas Jefferson commissioned, titled National Education in the United States of America, Pierre Du Pont de Nemours stating that "not more than four in a thousand are unable to write legibly" did not include slaves.

The idea that a private education system would leave many Americans less educated than the government-run education system of today is belied by this history and by the fact that the approximately 11% of schools today that are private out-perform the government schools readily.  Home-schooled children also greatly out-perform government-schooled children.

The government-run schools have little reason to teach children good reasoning skills, the knowledge they need to earn a living, and the habit of independent, critical thinking.  Without these attainments, it is a very uphill battle for individuals to achieve wisdom and the necessary skills to make their own value choices well.  Government-run schools have a tendency to propagate myths that support Big Government and diminish the exercise of individual rights.  Government-controlled education endangers children, future adults, and our constitutionally limited republican government of a few enumerated powers.  Government-educated students generally have no idea what purposes and achievements define a legitimate government, no sound understanding of individual rights, no thoughts about the intelligibility of laws and regulations, and no commitment to the Rule of Law.  Because the People are divided about ideas of morality, the government schools downplay moral principles.  They have little knowledge of history and the many lessons of how governments have deprived their citizens of their rights.  They have no understanding of basic economics and are taught to believe in policies that deny the basic Law of Supply and Demand and the importance of production itself.  They massively promote group identifications and victim-hood and victimizer status for these groups in a highly divisive manner.  They systematically undermine the much greater diversity and wealth of individual choices provided by the private sector in favor of the rigid, group oriented controls of the government sector.

The government-run education system wallows in a profound conflict-of-interest and because it is coercive and tax-funded, it has no reason to improve.  In fact, the schools are more commonly provided with more money the more they fail, providing them with no incentive to provide a decent education.  Government-run and controlled schools very commonly put the welfare of their under-performing employees well ahead of that of their under-performing students.

The state of education in America today is tragic and is much of the reason that the state of government in America today is increasingly harmful to the freedom, security, and general well-being of Americans.

New York Further Damages Economy with a Minimum Wage of $15/hr.

A minimum wage mandate is a serious infringement upon the rights of individuals to earn a living, to enter into contracts with one another, and their freedom of association.  It is a fundamentally unethical use of force in which third parties impose their ignorance and values upon others.  It should be opposed with great vigor as a matter of principle.

Too often, Americans believe they are pragmatists with little need for the principles that actually make it easier and far more efficient for them to identify the values and means by which people secure their lives and happiness.  They actually forgo valid principles thinking they can identify the practical means to achieve their values without them.  They pursue this phantom path to their perdition as often as to their happiness.

New York state just mandated a rise in the minimum wage to $15/hour throughout the state for fast food workers working for companies operating in 30 or more locations.  The full requirement has to be met in 2021, with staged increases before that.  The general minimum wage increased from $8.75/hour on 31 December 2014 to $9.00/hour.  Such state-wide minimum wage laws can cause very different degrees of harm in communities with different income levels and different costs of living.  It is also much harder for a state with a lower median household income than the national average to sustain the economic effects of a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour.

Let us examine how this lack of principled support for individual rights is going to cause further harm to the already sub-par New York state economy.  We will compare the median household incomes of many New York state cities to the national average of $53,046.  We will note the cost of living in those cities compared to the national average, given as 100%.  We will compute an effective median household income for these New York cities by dividing their median household income by their cost of living ratio with the national cost of living average.  We will then give the city effective median household income as a percentage of the national median household income.

City	Cost of Living % Compared to National Average	Median Household Income (National = $53,046)	Effective Median Household Income	% National Effective Median Household Income
Yorktown	109	$99,553	$91,333	172
Hauppauge	160	$102,601	$64,126	121
Niagara Falls	74	$33,324	$45,032	85
Schenectady	90	$38,485	$42,761	81
New York City	122	$51,865	$42,512	80
Buffalo	74	$30,502	$41,219	78
Watertown	97	$38,511	$39,702	75
Albany	102	$40,145	$39,358	74
Rochester	80	$30,708	$38,385	72
Elmira	83	$30,122	$36,292	68
Southampton	254	$90,855	$35,770	67
Jamestown	87	$30,835	$35,443	67
Syracuse	89	$31,459	$35,347	67
Poughkeepsie	112	$39,528	$35,293	67
Utica	89	$31,048	$34,885	66
Binghamton	92	$30,179	$32,803	62
Ithaca	113	$29,230	$25,867	49

Only Yorktown, home of many IBM operations, and Hauppauge on Long Island beat the national effective median household income!  Most of the cities in the state have effective median household incomes only 66 to 81% those of the nation as a whole!  The New York state economy is a very bad mess.  The people of New York are generally much worse off than the average American.  New York state was once a rich state and it still has many natural advantages that should help it to hold its own compared to other states, barring negative effects due to its Big Government state government model installed by decades of Democrat one-party control of the state.

There are two closely related reasons for this.  One is that government policies have a very large impact on the cost of living.  Big Government policies drive up the cost of living, until and unless those policies drive so many businesses away that people abandon their housing or are desperate to sell it to move to a location with jobs.  Housing prices drop precipitously in such cases.  Nine of the above cities have a housing cost of living which is 66% of the national average or lower.  These are desolate cities and include cost of housing values in Buffalo at 32%, Rochester at 35%, Niagara Falls at 34%, Jamestown at 38%,  Elmira at 39%, Syracuse at 45%, Utica at 45%, and Schenectady at 53%.

The other effect of Big Government is on businesses whose labor, regulatory, and tax costs are all driven up considerably.  Those businesses then fare worse in competition with other businesses nationally and internationally.  They expand more slowly than they would otherwise.  They have less money to invest in facilities, production equipment, employee training devoted to the company core purposes, research and development, quality control, and better pay and benefits for their employees generally.  They deliver lower returns to their investors and cause those investors to abandon them.  Highly skilled and hardworking employees move to states that pay them better and where they can find healthier companies with which to build their careers.  There is an inevitable failure of the state economy to keep up with those of states with more limited governments.

The abysmally low effective median household incomes of most of New York state's cities above are a result of and a clear indicator of the very unwise economic policies of the state of New York.  This was once a wealthy state with comparatively higher median incomes.  There is still great wealth in New York, but it is in the hands of a relative few people, thanks to government policies.  The very big government of the state of New York has been mostly controlled by Democrats for a 100 years, and when it was not, it was in the hands of Progressive Elitist Republicans.  Despite the many claims of concern for economic equality, the divergence in income levels in New York state is actually unusually large compared to most other states, especially those with much more limited power governments.

The cost of the higher than average minimum wage payments has to be spread over some combination of higher prices, lower wages for other employees, lower returns to investors, less investment in facilities except those which allow a facility to operate with fewer employees, and fewer low skill employees.  In general, the choices which will be made to meet the minimum wage demand will have the net effect of providing less money to the communities of New York.  Most of the people in these communities are already suffering by the national standard of income.  How are most of those people supposed to be able to pay a few among them much higher wages?  The present $9.00/hour general rate and the future $15/hour rate for fast food workers are well above the national average minimum wage.  The present high minimum wage is one of many factors responsible for the great income inequality and the low incomes of most New Yorkers already.

Minimum wages have less impact on communities in which most people are well-off, so they can afford to pay more for services.  When those higher minimum wages are in industries that compete outside the state, they hurt more than for local service industries.

The New York state minimum wages are going to hurt most New Yorkers.  They will hurt many businesses and eliminate jobs for the initially least productive potential employees.  Young, under-educated people will be the ones most likely not to be offered jobs.  Blacks and Hispanics will by and large suffer still higher unemployment rates than they do now.  Some will become wards of the state.  Some will leave the state to find jobs.  The working population will become older and older.  This will be a further drain on businesses over time.

It is not hard to figure out these effects.  Generally, economists recognize that labor pay increases with demand for labor.  Demand for labor increases when the added production of an employee more than covers all of the many costs associated with putting an employee to work.  Democrat Socialists who most often support minimum wage increases often know this, but they also know that most people would like to see low-paid workers paid more.  Some low-paid workers would like to be paid more.  Employers are in comparatively small numbers.  Vote maximization suggests that one count on the ignorance and the emotions of most voters on the effects of minimum wages.  They are popular.  But, wise leaders would steer away from them and would work hard to educate voters in the great harm they do.  Such leaders could do much to prevent cities in well-positioned states from falling far below the national effective median household income levels.  But, it is especially hard to find such wise leadership in the bowels of the Democrat Socialist Party.

I was surprised to find just how badly depressed the effective household income of most New Yorkers is.  One does not usually think of most New Yorkers and Mississippians as being in the same highly depressed income boat.  The choice of Democrats to rule one's state has dire consequences.

Speculators are Good in a Free Market

When I was a sophomore at Brown University in 1966-1967, I sat in on the first semester economics course and then took a test to get credit for the course.  I then took the second semester as a regular course.  The course was taught by a Brown Ph.D. graduate student and in a lecture he made it clear that he did not like speculators and that he did not understand their essential role in a free market economy.  I explained it to him after class, making myself late for my next class.  To this day, few people understand the critical and good role that speculators perform.  They are presently being blamed by Obama, Bill O'Reilly, and many others for the increasing price of gasoline at the pump.

Obama claims that there is plenty of oil available and the price of gasoline should not be so high.  But, he says the mean, cold-hearted, selfish speculators are driving the cost of oil up and therefor the cost of gasoline is going up.  There are indeed times when speculators do drive the cost of oil up.  There are also times when they drive the cost down.  The total longer term average of their effect on the price of oil is probably a downward effect.  Let us consider why this is the case.

If you look at the market for a given product, you see the free market price of that product now fairly readily, if you have a free market.  What is harder to figure out is what the future price of that product will be.  Let us take the case of oil, since that is the present example of most interest.  Let us suppose even that Obama is right that there is enough oil now to meet the present demand for oil in the sense that the supply and the demand do not dictate a price increase.  Is it perhaps the case that speculators are driving the price up?  It may very well be the case.  Yes, even Obama can be partly right every now and then.  Even though he has no understanding of economics and business at all, he is sometimes partly right about something in some moment of time.  What he is most likely wrong about is his assessment that the rising price is entirely caused by speculators and that their contribution is bad.

The speculators are bidding up the price of oil because they think that we will before very long face a situation in which the supply of oil will not be enough to satisfy the future demand for it without the price going up more even than the speculators are bidding it up to now.  The speculator makes money only if he is right in his assessment of the future supply and the future demand.  If he is wrong, he will lose his shirt.

So, speculators have recently bid up the cost of oil by buying it.  Why might they do this?  First, the world economy has been in a severe recession with a slow recovery, so present demand is still suppressed.  Countries such as India, China, and Brazil have had rapidly growing economies in recent times, which may surge ahead as the world gets over the recession.  Many people in under-developed countries have been improving their standard of living and are using more energy.  World trade will grow and the transportation of goods will increase.  Meanwhile, OPEC has been limiting its production of oil.  The national oil companies that control the vast majority of the world's presently developed oil fields are very inefficient oil producers.  Will they be able and inclined to increase production by enough to keep prices near present levels as economies continue to recover from the recession?  There is also a loss of production of oil in Libya and some legitimate concern that the unrest in the Middle East may lead to other disruptions of oil production in other countries. 

Even the rather free market oil companies are not able to increase oil production by much, because many countries are closed off to them and because the U.S. will not allow them to develop new oil fields offshore or on any of the vast federal lands.  Even on private land, they are often prevented from oil field development by lawsuits.  At the moment, there are also some oil refineries being threatened by production problems by the flooding of the Mississippi River.  In addition, speculators are predicting the future value of the dollar.  Will it continue to drop as the Federal Reserve continues to print money?  Perhaps the speculators think oil production will not therefor increase enough as demand increases to keep prices at present levels or at those that speculators are bidding the price up to currently.  Perhaps they are betting -- almost surely correctly -- that the value of the dollar will continue to shrink.

Let us suppose that the speculators are thinking this way and they have bid up the price of oil.  When that future time comes and many people are desperate for oil and its products such as gasoline and plastics, the present production oil of that future time would be bid up to very high prices by consumers.  It is then that the speculators let the oil they have been holding back onto the market.  The supply of oil is then increased and the price is driven down.  The speculator makes a profit if he was right about the future direction and rates of supply and demand changes and the value of the dollar.  If we deny him his profit, he has no reason to take the risk of acting on his judgment to try to smooth out price fluctuations.  The speculator takes advantage of price fluctuations to make a profit.  But, his act to make a profit, provides more supply when supply is low or demand is high, so his action reduces the price fluctuations that would otherwise occur.

In an act of idiocy, Congress made it illegal to speculate on the price of onions.  As a result, the price of onions fluctuates much more than most agricultural products.  Its price fluctuations were used as an illustration of what happens when speculators are removed from a market by a recent John Stossel program on Fox Business News.  He also discussed oil and onion prices in a column.  The horrible onion price fluctuation history goes back to 1958.  Because of the ban on onion speculation, onion prices recently went up by 36%, worse than the price increases on oil.

The present price of oil is not up just due to speculators in any case.  Much of the rise is due to the declining value of the dollar.  Obama and the big spending government thugs want badly to distract us from this effect.  They also want to distract us from the effects that past oil field development restrictions have had on oil prices, because they wish to continue those restrictions.  The loss of a large part of the Libyan oil production also causes world prices on oil to be bid up for its present effect on supply and demand.  Some states, desperate for more tax revenue, have also increased the gasoline tax.  The continued requirements for ethanol in gasoline and the increase of mixes to 15% ethanol causes the price of gasoline to go up as well.  All of these problems are caused by governments and our government wants our attention to be on speculators, not on it.  In similar past times, the government has investigated the role of speculators about 30 times and they never find anything substantial in the investigations.  These hearings are dog and pony show distractions just as Senator Hatch complained this last week.

I made the claim that the average effect of oil speculation is probably one of decreasing the cost.  Why would this be the case?  When the price of oil is low, many oil producers will cut back their higher cost production wells.  For instance, there are oil pumps all over the U.S. that pump oil only a few hours a day or less, as oil slowly seeps into the pump area from porous rock.  Delivering this small quantity of oil to market can be a bit expensive and the maintenance of the pumps which work such a small fraction of the time is high.  They simply get shut down when the price of oil goes way down.  Minimum oil production costs and then refining costs for gasoline will set something of a floor for how low oil and gasoline prices can go.  On the up side, however, there are many critical uses of oil and gasoline that make it possible for the price to go very high when demand becomes very great and the supply becomes too little.  Many a driver will still pay for gasoline to drive to work.  Many an American would pay $8 a gallon if he had to.  Many would pay $10/gallon.  Sudden decreases in supply or of demand could result in huge upward price spikes.

Yes, these price increases will bring on increased production.  For enough money, OPEC will crank up their production somewhat.  Those hour a day pumps will surely be turned back on.  Political pressure on the U.S. government will force it to allow some new oil field development.  While some deep water offshore oil fields will take 10 years of development, there are shallow off-shore and land sources that can be developed much faster.  There are old depleted oil fields in which more expensive oil recovery measures can be justified and more oil can be squeezed from them.  Greater effort can be made in refineries to break down large oil molecules to squeeze out more gasoline.  Things can be done to bring down the high prices, but many of them take time to occur.  Over shorter periods, prices can spike upward badly.  These deleterious effects are mitigated by the much maligned speculators.  Speculators are our friends.  Governments, both the U.S. and the OPEC governments, are our enemy.

Alan Reynolds - Scapegoating the Speculators

Alan Reynolds has written another interesting article on energy and pricing entitled "Scapegoating the Speculators." After the Democrats tried to claim that the price of oil had gone up greatly because the U.S. oil companies were responsible for manipulating the price and most of the public did not buy into their arguments, they and others, including John McCain, began focusing more and more on an explanation that the price of oil was higher due to speculators. Alan Reynolds offers some very interesting perspective on this claim.

But first before considering his argument further, why is this an important matter? If, as the Democrats are saying, speculators are driving up the cost of oil or even if they are not but are perceived to be doing so, then the Democrats can address the problem of high gas prices by passing a law to control the speculators. This gives them more power over the financial markets and will result in more campaign contributions from financial people who will want to get on their good side. What the Democrats and their occasional Republican ally (John McCain in part) will not then have to do is to allow U.S. oil companies to drill for more oil and gas. As environmentalist extremists and Global Warming Alarmists, these people do not want to allow more oil and gas to become available. They actually do want the price of oil and gas to go up even more, but they do not want to be seen as the responsible party for that price increase. This is all about perception in the eyes of the public. The Democrats do want to manipulate the supply of oil and gas to make the price go way up, but they do not always, especially with an election coming up, want to be perceived as having done so.

So, what does Reynolds say? Commodities speculators are just as happy to bet that oil prices will go down as to bet that they will go up. They are trying to anticipate the expected relationship of oil supply to oil demand. If next month's oil futures contract is for oil at a higher price, then producers may slow their sales on the spot market and try to wait a bit for the higher price. [This is usually a good thing, since it helps to level out prices by keeping supply and demand on a more even keel.] Refinery's are likely to buy more oil now rather than in the future if the future price is expected to be higher, thereby boosting the present price. But, if this combination of reactions to the higher future price occurs, then oil inventories will increase. At this time, U.S. oil inventories are modest, so this speculative boost to oil prices does not appear to be the case!

He notes that speculation that the price of oil would go up decreased after the price exceeded $100 per barrel. On 11 March, there were 113,307 long contracts (those expecting a future price increase) on the New York Mercantile Exchange. By 10 June, there were only 25,246 long contracts, meaning that there are nearly as many contracts going short (expecting a price decrease) as going long. Off the commodity exchange, one can bet on the future price of oil by investing in the US Oil Fund. Those betting short on this fund outnumber those betting long by a two to one ratio. These speculators are betting on the price of oil going down!

Reynolds says there is no mystery behind the rise in oil prices. There is booming demand for oil and products made from it in India, China, and the Middle East. The supply of oil from the U.S., Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Russia has fallen.

Back to my comments: U.S. oil production is falling because Congress and President Clinton have not allowed more exploration and drilling for oil in the U.S. Production continues to fall in Mexico because their nationalized oil company is run incompetently. Oil production in Venezuela is down because of the tyrannical reign and complete irrationality of Hugo Chavez. Nigeria's production is down due to internal unrest and sabotage. Russia's production is probably down because the oil companies there were taken over by ex-KGB thugs tied in with Putin.

Prices are always determined by supply and demand unless government sets the price. If government does set the price too low, then people stop producing and supplying that good or service. If we want to use oil at a reasonable price, then we have to allow the production of a goodly supply of oil. So, instead of wasting our time and money while we pay far too much for our gasoline, Congress needs to allow the exploration and production of oil on the federal lands in the contiguous 48 states, in Alaska, and in our coastal waters. This will increase supply and that will bring down the price of oil and its products, such as gasoline. Of course, with oil and gasoline as expensive as they are now, people will make greater efforts to conserve them as well. The magnitude of the world's demand increase is likely to run well ahead of conservation efforts alone, so both oil production increases and more efficient usage are the proper response.

A World with Many Fewer Women

Mark Steyn published a commentary in the Washington Times today about discrimination against women. He starts by discussing the claims of some that Hillary Clinton is losing the Democratic nomination as their Presidential candidate to a relative unknown with little experience because she is a woman. The best part of this discussion is how light-weight he describes Obama to be:

How else to explain why their gal got clobbered by a pretty boy with a resume you could print on the back of his driver's license, a Rolodex apparently limited to neo-segregationist racebaiters, campus Marxist terrorists and indicted fraudsters, and a rhetorical surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socrates. "On this Memorial Day," said Barack Obama last Monday, "as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes - and I see many of them in the audience here today."

Hey, why not? In Obama's Cook County, Ill., many fallen heroes from the Spanish-American War still show up in the voting booths come November. It's not unreasonable for some of them to turn up at an Obama campaign rally, too.

Then he notes that old-time sexism is common in much of the world. He relates some statistics about how people in many cultures are choosing to have male babies, while aborting female fetuses. In India there are 1000 boys for every 900 girls nationally. In some Punjabi cities there are only 300 girls for every 1000 boys. In China, the one child per couple requirement has couples also choosing boys over girls. The result is that the first generation born under this policy has 119 males for every 100 girls. One supposes that as couples can increasingly afford abortions, this ratio of males to females will grow.

Europe and Canada are dependent upon immigration not to lose population. Indian women in England and Wales gave birth to 114 boys for every 100 girls between 2000 and 2005. Indians, Chinese, and Koreans living in America have 1.05 boys to every girl for the first child, 1.17 boys to every girl for the 2nd child if the first was a girl, and 1.51 to 1.00 for the third child if the first two children were girls! It looks as though a lot of Asian-Americans will have to use their relative wealth to import wives from their homelands if they wish to marry within their ethnic group. India and China had better continue their economic growth at a high rate, so their young men will be able to import wives from other parts of the world. It is not clear that these societies are open to allowing their men to marry women from other cultures, however. The only other solution would be an inversion of the old practice of one man having several wives.

Steyn assumes that this female feticide will lead to a return to a kind of patriarchy. Perhaps it will mean the men will have the majority of votes in some democratic societies, but the very important law of supply and demand will operate here. As societies become too rich in males, the perceived value of the rarer females will increase. This first wave of very high preference for male children will be moderated. Young men will be desperate to acquire desirable and even just acceptable wives. These wives will be able to name their price and with many societies starting to modernize, they will more and more be able to choose a husband and hold the power of divorce to ensure that their man will treat them with honor and respect, not to mention giving them considerable power over spending family money. This will likely transform some of these traditionally very patriarchial societies.

Early America had a huge imbalance of excess males to females. This empowered women in America compared to their situation in old Europe at the time. In time, that gender imbalance became much less in the East than it was in the West. In 1869, the Wyoming Territory constitution allowed women to vote and to hold public office. In 1870, the Utah Territory allowed full suffrage to women. In 1893, Colorado approved female suffrage. By 1912, Idaho, Washington, California, Michigan, Kansas, Oregon, and Arizona gave women the vote. There is a pattern here. Western states, which suffered from too few women, valued women enough to give them a vote before the Eastern states did. This is evidence of the ubiquity of the Law of Supply and Demand.

It will be very interesting to see how the shortage of women among Indians and the Chinese plays out.