Golden girls: do parents prefer them?

0:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:25Germany has limited its military force since the end of the Second World War. But as America pulls back from Europe and the threat from Russia and elsewhere grows, Germany is finally rebuilding its fighting capacity. And I don't know about you, but I find it impossible to start my day without a giant mug of coffee. Apparently it may even do me some good beyond fueling my morning shift on the intelligence. So exactly how many cups should I drink a day?

1:02But first...

1:13Lots of people seem to really care about whether they're having a boy or girl. Vinjaro Mukandawire is a Britain correspondent. They have really elaborate gender reveal parties. There's cannons shooting out blue or pink confetti, scavenger hunts for clues. But all that expectation, the build-up, can actually lead to disappointment. So increasingly, at least according to the huge number of TikTok and Instagram videos made about it, the disappointment is being felt by unsuspecting boy moms. Personally, I never worried about all this. I didn't find out the gender of my children, but I did receive a lot of comments about it.

1:54Several people mentioned to me that they hoped I would have a girl. I ended up having two boys. It still doesn't bother me too much, but combined with all of the videos on TikTok and Instagram, about gender disappointment and gender reveal parties, it did get me thinking about whether the long-held preference for sons around the world is beginning to shift. So is it a thing? Yeah, it is a thing. Parents around the world have long shown a preference for sons, but that's rapidly diminishing. And a lot of this is spurred on by declining fertility rates. People having fewer children just means that they're under more pressure to secure their preferred sex.

2:34So let's just take a step back for a minute. Why did people prefer having boys in the past? Well, it differs from culture to culture, but historically, boys have carried the family name. They inherited the wealth. They also still have higher earning potential, whereas girls get married off. So throughout history, parents have mostly preferred sons. It might seem intuitive that there should be a 50-50 split between baby boys and baby girls, but actually there's a natural sex ratio pattern that's anywhere between 103 boys to 107 boys for every 100 girls. But the rise of ultrasound technology and scans in the 1980s meant that we had a lot more human meddling through sex-selective abortions, for instance.

3:21And in the 1990s, that swung the balance beyond what was considered biologically possible with catastrophic consequences for girls. So in some places like China, you had as many as 200 boys born for every 100 girls in some parts of the country. And that led to the problems that we've seen since with missing girls, millions of them who would have been alive if they hadn't been aborted or killed or sadly neglected to death. Our data journalists have done some number crunching on this, and they found that today the global gender side is down by a quarter from its peak, and that saved 8 million girls and counting.

4:00So what you're saying is there is still a preference for boys, but it's not as marked. Yes, it's still a problem. In China, for instance, you're still seeing about 100 ,000 baby girls being aborted every year. It's come down significantly, but clearly still an issue in some parts of the world. So why the shift in preferences? We don't know what's causing it, but we do know that prospects for boys and young men are deteriorating. Boys trail girls in all stages of education. They're expelled at far higher rates. They also attend university at lower rates. We know that the gender gap at universities in America is larger today than in 1972, except it now favors women.

4:41Teenage boys are more likely to be involved in crime. They encounter higher rates of suicide. And then another reason is the cultural reckoning around misogyny. Ruth Whitman talks about this in her book, Boy Mom. We've seen big news stories about poor male behavior from Harvey Weinstein and the Me Too movement to Jeffrey Epstein and Andrew Tate. More recently, there was a mass rape trial of Gisele Pellicott's ex-husband and 50 other men. And the relentlessness of modern parenting also plays a role, I think. Early education has become far more demanding. It's more academically rigorous. Girls are seen as more likely to hit the milestones that parents value.

5:25That includes fine motor skills, which help with things like holding a pencil when children start school, and they also tend to be better at sitting still. And are these shifts universal? Look, I should say this again, that boy preference still persists. And on a purely economic basis, the historical reasons that people thought boys would be the better option still persist. The world of work still favours men, and there are still more Andrews and Simons than women full stop leading FTSE 100 companies in Britain. But we can still see evidence of this shift in poll after poll around the world. We are still seeing a preference for boys in countries like China and India, but that's come down sharply.

6:05In places like Taiwan, parents seem to have little preference either way. But other countries report a clearer preference. In the Caribbean, more than one in three households prefer daughters. The preference for daughters is true for Southeast Asian countries, such as the Philippines and elsewhere in the developing world. We're seeing that gender still matters, but that people want a balance. They want a boy and a girl. That's true for Bangladesh. It's true for most of sub-Saharan Africa. Although what's interesting is actually that West African countries, including Senegal, are still more likely to lean towards boys.

6:40Whereas in rich countries like South Korea, that large bias that we once saw for boys has disappeared altogether. Japan prefers girls as well. A pro-girl bias has been detected across Scandinavia and other European countries, such as the Netherlands and Portugal. And in America, parents with only daughters were once more likely than parents with only sons to keep having children, presumably to try for a boy. Today, the reverse is true. Having girls is associated with lower fertility rates. Although I would add that the Gallup poll in 2018 suggested that men would still actually prefer boys. Vinjero, when I was learning about the birds and the bees, you didn't get much choice what flavour baby you came out with at the end.

7:26So how are people actually acting on this and how do we know that this is their preference? Rosie, that's still true. Most people still don't get much choice. It's worth stating that even parents that have a preference won't necessarily act on them. IVF is expensive. Abortion is psychologically and emotionally difficult. But those who do act on their preferences are willing to pay quite a lot of money. In New York City, a fertility clinic that I spoke to charge upwards of$20 ,000 for gender selection through IVF, for instance. And wealthy families travel from countries like the UK, where the practice is banned.

8:02Adoptive parents in the US are also willing to pay quite a bit more. They'll pay as much as$16 ,000 to insure a daughter. And in South Korea, girls accounted for nearly two-thirds of adoptions in 2020. And the other thing I'd add is that diverse pathways to parenthood are another factor here. So for instance, lesbian couples are more likely to have concerns about their ability to socialize boys. So an increasing number of same-sex parents will influence how couples consider the gender of their offspring. even as societies modernize and strive for equality of the sexes parents appear as invested as ever really in the gender of their babies but with girls increasingly considered the prize absolutely fascinating thank you so much for talking to me thanks for having me

9:05Earlier this month, Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office. When the Americans once ended a war in Europe, and I think this is in your hand in specific, in ours. In their conversation, Merz cast back to the Second World War, trying to coax America to once again be a peacemaker in Europe. Instead, Trump praised Germany's recent decision to reinvest in its armed forces. I know that you're spending more money on defense now. That's a positive thing. I'm not sure that General MacArthur would have said it's positive. During the Cold War, the country's ground troops stood on the front line of NATO territory, facing off a Soviet threat from the east.

9:50Since then, its fighting force has dwindled. But as America's security guarantee begins to look shaky, there is little choice but for Germany to step in, with a permanent deployment of troops on foreign soil for the first time since the 1940s. Germany's new government, which took office a few weeks ago, its animating mission, I think it's fair to say, is going to be rearmament. Pouring money into the defence budget, building up the Bundeswehr, taking on more responsibility for European security. Tom Nuttall is our Berlin bureau chief. And perhaps the starkest manifestation of that shift was the inauguration of a German tank brigade in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, a couple of weeks ago.

10:38So it's been a while, Tom, since German troops were welcome in Lithuania? I think that's fair to say, but what was so extraordinary about this event was the kind of unalloyed joy with which it was treated in Vilnius. You had locals lining the streets, clapping, cheering, welcoming the German tanks that were rolling through the Lithuanian capital. You had city buses, which had Lithuania loves Germany displays at the front. So, Fridjek Mertz, the new chancellor, Boris Pistorius, the defense minister, were both there in Vilnius to inaugurate this new tank brigade. We know that security doesn't begin at all borders.

11:21It begins where our allies and partners have to defend it. That's why Lithuania's security is also our security. The protection of Vilnius is the protection of the tank brigade. How is Germany going about this remilitarization? What's happening? I mean, a lot is happening. And we should start by saying that this began before the arrival of this new government. You might remember, Rosie, just a few days after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, the then Chancellor Olaf Scholz instigated what he called the Zeitung Wende or turning point in German security. And apart from anything else, that meant pouring money into the Bundeswehr, a special fund of 100 billion euros was created that lifted Germany to what was then the 2 % of GDP NATO defense spending target.

12:14The new government is going to take that much further. Just a few days after the election in February, we had a vote in the Bundestag to essentially exempt defence spending from the notorious debt break, this fiscal constraint you have in Germany, which is a line in the constitution that strictly limits the money that the federal government can borrow every year. Germany's government has already signalled that it will sign up to this 5 % target that the Americans have been pushing. This is a long-term target, but there are already all sorts of plans to use the money that's going to be pouring into the Bundeswehr to make this really modern, war-capable army.

12:57So it's one thing to throw money at this, but is the German military ready to ramp up? Yes, it's a really important question. Germany is no stranger to bureaucracy, to put it mildly. and the military planning and procurement process is no exception to that. There are various efforts afoot to relax regulations, to reorganise or in some cases circumvent the existing bureaucratic structures. There is a proposed law in the works. Rosie, I know that you have a particular fondness for German compound nouns. This one is the Planungs - und Beschaffungsbeschleunigungsgesetz. Any German listeners will have to excuse my pronunciation.

13:36This is the Planning and Procurement Acceleration Act. And the idea here is that you can do things like exempt various pieces of procurement from certain environmental regulations or planning regulations just to make things work a little bit more smoothly and a little bit more quickly. Some people think this isn't going to be enough. They think that you need to kind of blow the whole system up and build it up from scratch. I don't think that's going to happen in a place like Germany. But the one reassuring thing is that the policymakers do at least have their eye on the ball in this. What kind of wars are we going to be fighting in the future?

14:07This is a big discussion in Germany right now. So to kind of oversimplify a little bit, you could characterize it as steel versus drones. In other words, how much money will be going to those old, big industrial giants, companies like Rheinmetall, who will build tanks, artillery pieces, submarines, these kind of big ticket items, and how much will be going on next generation systems, AI-enabled drones, electronic warfare, capabilities in space, and there's often different sorts of companies, startup-type firms who are specializing in this sort of warfare. Now, what a lot of people I've spoken to say is that we have to do both.

14:44We don't know what the wars of the future are going to look like, so we have to be prepared for whatever confronts us. And now that we've lifted the fiscal constraint, Germany is going to be in a better position to make itself ready for the warfare of the future than it has been in the past. And are people signing up to fight? Yeah, this is maybe going to be the biggest question of all. So Germany had a form of conscription until 2011. It was then scrapped or technically suspended under Angela Merkel's government. There are numerical targets for the Bundeswehr that are probably going to increase after the NATO summit at the end of this month.

15:22It's very difficult to find anyone who knows anything about this stuff who thinks that the Bundeswehr will be able to meet these targets just by voluntary means alone. What they have agreed to do is to send all 18-year-old male school leavers a questionnaire that they will be obliged to fill in about their willingness to join up, their fitness, they might have to do a medical test, and the hope is that you'll plant the idea in enough people's minds to get them to sign up. No one really thinks this is going to be sufficient. So I think in the next year or two, this question of conscription is going to come right back onto the agenda.

16:00This is going to be a very difficult proposition to say, OK, all male school leavers have to sign up, but the female school leavers, you're absolutely fine, and we'll just leave you alone. Germany would have to change the constitution to extend that to women. So Friedrich Mertz says he wants the Bundeswehr to be, in his words, the strongest conventional army in Europe. Germany, of course, is not a nuclear power like Britain, France or the United States. It's actually prohibited from becoming one. And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. So this is about building up the conventional army, building up conventional armaments.

16:35So essentially, Germany wants to go back to what it was in the 1980s, which is to become the geographical enabler for NATO in the event of a crisis on the Eastern Front. And that is now where all of the efforts of the top brass, military and political, are being directed. Tom, great to talk to you. Thank you so much. Thanks, Rosie. To hear more about Germany, this week's Money Talks, our business and finance show, asks whether the Merz government reforms can reinvent the German economy. That's out on Thursday. And you've heard this before. You'll need to be a subscriber to listen.

17:26Every so often, I threaten to give up coffee. Those who know me and know how grumpy I get without it tell me that would be a terrible idea. I see my addiction as crucial for getting me through the day. And now it turns out that it might actually have some other health benefits. So humanity drinks over 2 billion cups of coffee every day. And, I mean, obviously, speaking for myself, that cup of coffee every morning is absolutely vital to sitting down and writing economist articles. Otherwise, especially if I've had a sleepless night looking after my kid, I'm just not functional. Matt Kaplan is a science correspondent for The Economist.

18:07But folks have been wondering for a long time whether or not those cups of coffee grant any sorts of benefits beyond the mental alertness that we all know and love. And the answer appears to be yes. Matt, I'm sitting here with my coffee, which is also completely crucial. Tell me about those benefits. So in lab studies that have been done in the past, they've looked at the components of coffee, which go well beyond caffeine. You've got these other compounds like chlorogenic acids and caweol and cafestol, which are all chemicals that do a very important thing, and that is mopping up oxidative products in your body.

18:48So oxidation is the process by which oxygen molecules can cause damage to your cells. And when you eat or drink stuff that neutralizes that oxygen, it can actually help reduce damage to your body over time. And they've demonstrated that in the lab, coffee components definitely do that. So that's where a lot of the research started from. But you've been looking at the other benefits of coffee as well, right? So yeah, beyond antioxidant properties, coffee also seems to reduce the risk of people developing certain cancers and certain mental disorders. Those include breast cancer and liver cancer.

19:29The research is strongest with liver cancer, with several labs replicating work showing that if you drink a lot of coffee, like three or more cups a day, your chances of developing certain types of liver cancer go down. And that's really interesting because it suggests that something in the coffee that people are consuming, it could be these antioxidant products, are preventing the cancer cells from establishing themselves. One bit of work was conducted at the University of Porto in Portugal, which demonstrated that cafestol and cawial, which are these chemicals in coffee, stopped tumors from developing new blood vessels.

20:08That's a huge benefit that coffee potentially grants because it effectively suppresses cancer growth and stops the cancers from being able to take off. The same thing can be said for Parkinson's, depression, and even Alzheimer's. It looks like drinking a fairly large amount of coffee every day, again like three or more cups, reduces your risk of developing these neurological effects. One study that was conducted in 2020 with Parkinson's revealed that those who already had been diagnosed with the disease, if they were regular coffee drinkers, the progression of the disease was slowed. And that's a pretty big deal since Parkinson's is a long-term disease.

20:47So Matt, the question that we really want to know is how much is the right amount of coffee to drink? It's hard to identify exactly where the cutoff is. Is it possible to overindulge in coffee? Yes. Whether or not going crazy with coffee means you have even more protection against cancer growth remains unclear. But we know for sure that if you're drinking more than like 400 milligrams of caffeine daily, which, you know, in lay terms is more than seven espressos. I don't do that. Do you? I do not either. There was a time when I was at CERN in Geneva working in the press office over there. I was much younger and less experienced with coffee.

21:28I was definitely going past that 400 milligram limit. and it turns out that I was having heart palpitations, tremors. I wasn't able to focus. I was starting to suffer from anxiety. I'm sure my blood pressure was through the roof, and these are all things that people have found. Will you really, really ratchet up the caffeine? It's not good for you. You're going to have all kinds of insomniac problems, so overdose is definitely bad, but this is a double-edged sword because that caffeine that gets you going also seems to prevent you from developing Parkinson's. So therefore the question is, how much is too much?

22:05Looks like 400 milligrams. Do you have to get close to that boundary to give yourself extra protection against neurological diseases? Does caffeine play a role there? Or is it the other stuff in coffee? We don't know. The reason a lot of the research hasn't been replicated is because we're all over the place in being able to run controlled studies. Those are just not being done. they're hard to do. So we need a standardized unit of caffeine in the same way as we have a standardized unit of alcohol. We need a standardized unit of coffee where we say, okay, you lot of 3 ,000 people, you are going to drink 200 milliliters of black coffee from this plant processed in this way every day for 10 years.

22:51And you're all going to eat the same diet every day. And we're going and monitor you and see how it affects you. Because remember, the coffee comes in multiple types and then you have all of the different processing mechanisms and those matter. So until you can actually get everything in line, it's really, really hard to replicate these results and be absolutely sure of what the coffee is doing for people. Absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much, Matt. Great to see you. It's my pleasure. Good to talk to you.

23:25Thank you.

23:55Thank you.