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On Sunday, New York Times economics
columnist David Leonhardt reviewed the new book "More
Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics"
by Steven Landsburg, a regular contributor to the liberal
site Slate.com. Leonhardt panned the book as too cute
and too far afield from the "dismal science"
of economics, but the Times book editors gave the Landsburg
thesis an excerpt on the Times website. According to
Landsburg, people who are chaste and monogamous (who
practice "extreme sexual conservatism") cause
the spread of AIDS through the "sin of self-restraint."
The excerpt begins:
It's true: AIDS is nature's awful retribution
for our tolerance of immoderate and socially irresponsible
sexual behavior. The epidemic is the price of our permissive
attitudes toward monogamy, chastity, and other forms
of extreme sexual conservatism. You've read elsewhere
about the sin of promiscuity. Let me tell you about
the sin of self-restraint.
Consider Martin, a charming and generally
prudent young man with a limited sexual history, who
has been gently flirting with his coworker Joan. As
last week's office party approached, both Joan and Martin
silently and separately entertained the prospect that
they just might be going home together. Unfortunately,
Fate, through its agents at the Centers for Disease
Control, intervened. The morning of the party, Martin
happened to notice one of those CDC-sponsored subway
ads touting the virtues of abstinence. Chastened, he
decided to stay home. In Martin's absence, Joan hooked
up with the equally charming but considerably less prudent
Maxwell - and Joan got AIDS.
When the cautious Martin withdraws from
the mating game, he makes it easier for the reckless
Maxwell to prey on the hapless Joan. If those subway
ads are more effective against Martin than against Maxwell,
they are a threat to Joan's safety. This is especially
so when they displace Calvin Klein ads, which might
have put Martin in a more socially beneficent mood.
Economics aside, this does not morally
compute. Would the Times book editors pluck out of obscurity
a tome that argued that people who don’t drive
cause global warming? Pacifists cause wars? Vegetarians
cause the mass slaughter of chickens? But there, on
the Times website, Landsburg is unloading purple prose:
"If multiple partnerships save lives, then monogamy
can be deadly." His language grew even more colorful,
comparing chastity to pollution:
Martin's chastity is a form of pollution
-- chastity pollutes the sexual environment by reducing
the fraction of relatively safe partners in the dating
pool. Factory owners pollute too much because they have
to breathe only a fraction of their own pollution; Martin
stays home alone too much because he bears only a fraction
of the consequences.
Leonhardt is right on the broad point
that it’s clumsy for economists who want to apply
their theories to every facet of life, as if market
principles could explain the mysteries of every human
action. I’d add the intangibles like emotion, and
religious faith. Consider the dry academic approach
of this Landsburg passage:
If you are a monomaniac whose goal is
to minimize the prevalence of AIDS, then you should
encourage Martin to have more sex. But if you are a
sensible person whose goal is to maximize the difference
between the benefits of sex and the costs of AIDS -
then you should encourage Martin to have even more sex.
To an economist, it's crystal clear
why people with limited sexual pasts choose to supply
too little sex in the present: their services are underpriced.
If sexual conservatives could effectively advertise
their histories, HIV-conscious suitors would compete
to lavish them with attention. But that doesn't happen,
because conservatives are hard to identify. Insufficiently
rewarded for relaxing their standards, they relax their
standards insufficiently.
But the exchange of sexual pleasure
isn’t a mere economic transaction, like buying
a Mac or a Big Mac. For example, if Martin and Joan
have sex, and Martin never talks to Joan again, was
it a "socially beneficent" act? Landsburg’s
simple-minded thesis that more sex is almost always
good also ignores the less than "socially beneficent"
facts like abortions, sexually transmitted diseases,
pornography, and prostitution, not to mention the emotional
wreckage that one-night stands or serial adultery can
cause.
Landsburg clearly has no variable for
religion, a major factor in the spread of that "immoderate
and socially irresponsible" trend of monogamy and
chastity. He has not pondered that for religious people,
armed with a sincere aspiration to avoiding the eternal
consequences of sin, there is no convincing argument
for casual dabbling in "safe" sin or "socially
beneficent" sin. The notion of a "sin of self-restraint"
turns religion upside down – which is actually
a fairly common acrobatic practice in the pages of the
New York Times.
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