In respect to China, I am happy to not be a part of those odds. That being said, I would assume the imbalance isn’t bad for the top tier females. If anything, they accrue more benefits with their increased relative value, unless they decide they are too good for any partner.

To respond to your first comment: The key is your phrase “plausibly assume.” As you know, in accounting, there is a general presumption that we do not net assets and liabilities, but rather show the gross numbers on both sides of the balance sheet. One exception to this rule is the “defeasance” of a liability. In this case, the accountants allow such netting because a liability is exactly matched by payoff from a riskless asset, such as United States Treasury Bonds. The accountants allow this because there is no risk — baring a default on the Treasuries — that the asset will not produce sufficient money to pay off the liability and the cash receipts are exactly timed to the cash outflows, both of which are fixed. This strikes me as a logical accounting treatment but it is far, far from the situation with pension assets and liabilities, where both the assets and the liabilities are subject to large risks and timing variability. So, I guess that I would respond by saying that, if the extreme rigor applied to defeasance transactions is reasonable, how can a much laxer standard apply to a “defeasance” of a pension liability? The simple truth is that the accountants have collapsed in front of political pressure, from both governments and companies, and there is no logic to their position.

Your comment about China’s surplus males is interesting and chilling. I know that, like me, you are a fan of evolutionary psychology. The tendency of unattached males to aggression, along with the response to overpopulation in Rwanda that you cite, are good examples of evolutionary holdovers in human behaviour. Sometimes, reason can overrule these tendencies. Let’s hope that this is one such case.

No real comment about the allocation of Senate seats, except to say that, given the general tendency of less densely populated states to vote Republican — perhaps another manifestation of evolutionary psychology? — I would prefer to let this particular sleeping dog lie. Although this system occasionally throws up some outrageously stupid, “pork barrel” policies like the ethanol subsidy (or agricultural subsidies in general), the alternative would be far worse.