Problems with Problems with Two Children
I have written ad nauseam about the ambiguity of problems with children. Usually a problem with two children is formulated as follows:
Mr. Smith has two children and at least one of them is a boy. What is the probability that he has two boys?
I don’t want to repeat my arguments for why this problem is ambiguous. Today I want to discuss other problematic assumptions about these problems.
Assumption 1: The probability of a child being a boy is 1/2. We know that this is not the case. Usually boys are born more often than girls. In addition to that, when policy interferes, the numbers can change. When China had their one-child policy, 118 boys were born per 100 girls. That makes a probability of a boy 0.54.
Assumption 2: The gender of one child in a family is independent of the gender of the other children. I am not sure where this assumption comes from, but I easily came up with a list of possible influences on this situation.
- A family can have identical twins.
- Families that adopt children can choose the gender of those kids.
- There are studies showing that people (especially men) can have a genetic predisposition to one gender of their children over the other.
- Sex-selective abortion is possible in many countries.
- In vitro fertilization and artificial insemination can use sex-selection techniques.
- People may reject their newborns based on sex.
- The decision to have a second child depends on the gender of the first child.
I would like to discuss how the last bullet point changes the probabilities in two children problems. Let us consider China. Up to now China had a one-child policy with some exceptions. In some cases if the first child was a girl, the family was allowed a second child. For the sake of argument, imagine a county where people are allowed to have a second child only if the first one is a girl. A family with two boys wouldn’t exist in this county. Thus the probability of having two boys is zero.
I tried to find the data about the distribution of children by gender in multi-children families. I couldn’t find any. I would be curious to know what happens in real life, especially in China.
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