Blog do Professor Arão Alves - História em Gotas

BEATRICE WEBB grew up as a fervent believer in free markets and limited government. Her father was a self-made railway tycoon and her mother an ardent free-trader. One of her family’s closest friends was Herbert Spencer, the leading philosopher of Victorian liberalism. Spencer took a shine to young Beatrice and treated her to lectures on the magic of the market, the survival of the fittest and the evils of the state. But as Beatrice grew up she began to have doubts. Why should the state not intervene in the market to order children out of chimneys and into schools, or to provide sustenance for the hungry and unemployed or to rescue failing industries? In due course Beatrice became one of the leading architects of the welfare state—and a leading apologist for Soviet communism. The argument about the relative merits of the state and the market that preoccupied young Beatrice has been raging ever since. Between 1900 and 1970 the pro-statists had the wind in their sails. Go

A glimmer of hope in the sad tale of sex-selective abortion in India THE march of sex-selective abortion in Asia seems relentless. Not every society adopts the practice, but those that do—and they include the two largest countries on earth—have seen it spread through every social group, unhampered by growing wealth. Indeed, middle-income couples seem more willing and better able to manipulate the sex of their children than are the poor. And they are more likely to want smaller families, increasing the premium on sons in countries where males are seen as more valuable. As a result, richer areas have more sex selection than poorer ones and sex selection tends to rise as countries get richer. In China the sex ratio at birth is much more distorted in rich Shanghai and Guangzhou than in poor Tibet. From 2001-11, India’s GDP more than doubled and the census of 2011 found only 914 girls aged 0-6 for every 1,000 boys, worse even than the abysmal tally in 2001, when there were