Thanks to China's ?one child only? policy adopted 30 years ago, and a cultural preference for children who grow up to become family safety nets, there are now 32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls.

Large scale interference with the natural male:female ratio has been tracked with some fascination by demographers for years, and is constantly generating unintended consequences.

Until early in the last century, starving rural mothers abandoned unwanted female newborns in the hills to be taken away by ?spirits.?? Today, pregnant women resort to the modern day equivalent by getting ultrasounds and undergoing abortions when they learn they are carrying girls.

Millions of children are ?little emperors,? spoiled male-only children who have been raised to expect the world to revolve around them.? The resulting shortage of women has led to an epidemic of ?bride kidnapping? in surrounding countries. Stealing of female children is widespread in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Mongolia.

The end result has been a barbell shaped demographic curve unlike that seen in any other country. The Beijing government says the program has succeeded in bringing the fertility rate from 3.0 down to 1.8, well below the 2.1 replacement rate.? As a result, the Middle Kingdom's population today is only 1.2 billion instead of the 1.6 billion it would have been.

Political scientists have long speculated that an excess of young men would lead to more bellicose foreign policies by the Middle Kingdom. But so far the choice has been for commerce, to the detriment of America's trade balance and internet security.

In practice, the one child policy has only been applied to those who live in cities or have government jobs. That is about two thirds of the population.

On my last trip to China I spent a weekend walking around Shenzhen city parks. The locals doted over their single children, while visitors from the countryside played games with their three, four, or five children. The contrast couldn?t have been more bizarre.

Economists now wonder if the practice will also understate China's long-term growth rate. Parents with boys tend to be bigger savers, so they can help sons with the initial big-ticket items in life, like an education, homes, and even cars.

The end game for this policy has to be the Japan disease; a huge population of senior citizens with insufficient numbers of young workers to support them. The markets won't ignore this.

In the latest round of reforms announced by the Chinese government was the demise of the one child policy. But no matter how hard you try, you can?t change the number of people born 30 years ago.

The boomerang effects of this policy could last for centuries.

One of my many alma maters, the University of Southern California announced that they had received their largest private donation in history.

As a third generation alumni of this fanatical football factory (I went to school with Mark Harmon, Lynn Swan, and, oops, OJ Simpson), I still receive their alumni newsletter, where I learned the good news.

David and Dana Dornsife gave $200 million to the downtown Los Angeles home of the Trojans. The money will be used to fund the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, which will be renamed after them.

Dornsife made his fortune as the owner of Herrick Corp., a Stockton based maker of the prefabricated steel that was used to build many of the skyscrapers in the center of Los Angeles.

The gift tops the university's previous largest gift from George Lucas, of Star Wars fame, who in 2006 contributed $175 million to USC's film school, which he once attended with film legend, Steven Spielberg.

For the record, the largest charitable contribution to a university in history was the $600 million that Gordon Moore, of Moore's Law fame and a founder of Intel (INCT),? gave Caltech in nearby Pasadena. As a teenager, I used to sit in on the math classes. Notice that all of these big donations to education are happening in California.

Tommy Trojan will no doubt be happy, provided that a Bruin from UCLA has not stolen his sword again, or painted him blue. And don?t ask me about ?Old Tire Biter.?

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