Sex and Economics
I am majoring in...ECO NOMICS. I read and puke upon the Wall Street Journal.
(from my imitation of Gary Numan, decades ago)
arbyte.us links to a Tyler Cowen post that quotes Michael Vassar:
...all forms of consequentialism have a great deal of difficulty interpreting sexual behavior. To put things short, there is an inexplicable shortage of sex. Given that studies show that women and men enjoy it more than most other activities (on average, not on the margin I'll grant), and given its intrinsically low cost, it appears that even a crude approximation of a utility maximizing person would probably spend much more time having sex than most do. Do you know of any economic discussion of this?
Tyler provided some points:
...2. The average utility of sex is high but the marginal utilities are falling off a cliff. You just don't want any more. But how many people are at this margin?...
4. There has been a market failure, but the Internet is remedying it. People are having more sex and this will only go up.
5. Sex stops being fun when you do it to close a gap between your marginal utilities. It requires spontaneity or some other quality inconsistent with the classical model of the consumer and the equation of marginal rates of substitution....
8. The market-clearing price for more sex is positive, and people feel shame about paying too explicitly; see also #5....
This has, of course, prompted more research (but so far I don't think it's Federally-funded). Witness The Fly Bottle:
The obvious answer to Tyler's puzzle about why people don't have more sex is that the cost is not in fact low. It strikes me as bizarre on its face to think of sex as a low-cost activity. Most people don't want sex, per se, but want sex with a person with whom they want to have sex that wants to have sex with them. For many, then, supply is low, and search costs are high....
voluntaryXchange examines this in the context of free vs. fair trade issues:
Economists are great advocates of free trade. Voluntary exchange...between consenting individuals yields gains-from-trade; that is, an objective sense in which both sides are better off. Sounds a bit like sex too.
The great difficulty that free trade has when it confronts the legions of folk economists out on the street is that it is silent on how those gains-from-trade are divided. Envy and suspicion are almost always included in the driving factors that lead to each breakdown of free trade.
Any number of paradoxes and anomalies familiar to economics teachers point to the importance of the perception of fair division of gains-from-trade....[W]ould you rather have a lot of sex with a partner perceived as undesirable by others, or less sex with someone perceived as desirable by others? Just as with money, I think a lot of people would choose the latter....
My insight is that sex is a form of fair trade. Partners don't seem to care too much about whether sex makes them both better off, as much as whether it makes them both better off in some reasonable proportion....
Prague TV notes the following:
More money does not lead to more sex, economic researchers concluded in a study released by a major US economic institute.
The study by David Blanchflower of Dartmouth University and Andrew Oswald of Britain's Warwick University focused on the "still relatively unexplored links between income, sexual activity and well-being," the economists wrote....
The researchers, who based the report on a survey of 16,000 Americans, said the effort was part of an "emerging branch of economics" aimed at determining "the empirical determinants of happiness."
This was the first effort to study "econometric happiness equations in which sexual activity is an independent variable."
"The paper finds that sexual activity enters strongly positively in happiness equations," the economists wrote....
The report found "no statistically significant correlation" between levels of income and sexual activity.
"Money, it seems, does not buy more sexual partners."...
A study out of the UK reached these conclusions:
I'll buy you a diamond ring my friend
If it makes you feel all right
I'll get you anything my friend
If it makes you feel all right
'Cause I don't care too much for money
For money can't buy me love...
Say you don't need no diamond ring
And I'll be satisfied
Tell me that you want those kind of things
that money just can't buy
For I don't care too much for money
For money can't buy me love...
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