‘More sex is safer sex’

Did you know that by avoiding casual sex you could actually increase the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs)?  Or that taller and fairer people earn much more than others. Moreover, what if you were told that these are conclusions of an economist.

Meet Steven E Landsburg, an American professor of economics at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. “The world is full of surprises, and surprises are both instructive and fun,” says Landsburg.

Author of popular books like The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life (1993) and More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics (2007), in this interview, Landsburg speaks to DNA Money’s Vivek Kaul

In this day and age when AIDS is a major threat what made you come to the unconventional conclusion of more sex is safer sex?
I was led to this startling conclusion by the research of Professor Michael Kremer at Harvard University.  Professor Kremer is one of the deepest and most original thinkers in the field of economics. In this case, he combined his economic insight with some standard insights from the field of epidemiology to discover that there are two ways to slow down the spread of STDs: You can encourage the most promiscuous people to have less sex, or you can encourage the least promiscuous people to have more sex.  Either way you improve the quality of the partner pool.

I was particularly interested in deconstructing Kremer’s argument to determine how much of it relies on epidemiology and how much on pure economics.  It turns out that economics alone provides enough tools to prove that the world is improved when the least promiscuous take on additional partners. The argument relies on exactly the same principles that prove the world is improved when firms control their carbon emissions.  I think the broad applicability of simple principles is part of what makes economics so much fun.

You write in your book “people solve problems, and when there are more people, more problems get solved.” Hence, be fruitful and multiply. Why do you say that?
The “hence” does not follow without further argument; it’s the further argument that’s the fun part. Your children are sure to have ideas that improve the world, but they’re also sure to demand a share of the world’s resources.  How, then, can we know whether more children would be, on balance, a good thing or a bad thing?

The right way to think about this is to look at the incentives that parents face. It turns out that they bear most of the costs of having children, but reap only a fraction of the benefits.

Therefore, they must be biased in the direction of having too few children. This is another application of the same principle that tells us the world has too much pollution, too much casual sex on the part of the highly promiscuous, and too little casual sex on the part of the least promiscuous. In each case, you carefully examine the social costs and benefits, and you ask what fractions of those costs and benefits are felt by the decision-maker. That tells you in which direction the decisions are biased.

Why do taller and fairer people earn more than others do?
Not all taller people earn more than others.  It turns out that people who were tall “as adolescents” earn more than others, whereas those who only became tall in adulthood do not. This suggests that tall people earn more not because of how others look at them, but because of how (in adolescence) they learned to look at themselves.

“All over the world, boys hold marriages together, girls break them up.” Why is that?
All over the world, parents of daughters are more likely to get divorced, and I talk in the book about why this is likely to be a matter of causality, rather than mere correlation.
One possible theory is that fathers are more willing to stay in a bad marriage for the sake of a son than of a daughter.  I talk a lot in the book about the evidence for and against such theories.

You write that “things work out better when people feel the cost of their actions.” Why is that?
Because feeling the costs of your actions gives you an incentive to reconsider your actions. A vending machine that gave out Cokes for free would always be empty.  The reason you can buy a Coke is that other, less thirsty people left some behind for you, and they did this because otherwise they’d have had to pay a cost. As it is, Coke machines “do” tend to be empty on very hot days, and it would be a good thing if they charged more on those days.  The Coca-Cola company floated that idea for awhile, but unfortunately they abandoned it under public pressure.  As a result, a lot of very thirsty people won’t be able to get Cokes on hot days.

You say that when it comes to charity, it makes sense giving exclusively to your favourite charity. Why do you say that?
Because whatever argument dictates the choice of recipient for your first dollar should also dictate the choice of recipient for your second dollar.

Your views on sweatshops and labour standards in third world countries (or emerging markets, as we like to euphemistically call them) seems to be against the majority view prevailing in the western nations. Why is that?
I can’t tell you why the majority view is as it is.  But it does seem to me to be the height of arrogance for wealthy westerners to tell impoverished Asians not to send their kids to work.  The fact is that westerners used to be as poor as Asians are now, and at that time-roughly 150 years ago-westerners sent their kids to work in roughly the same numbers that Asians do today.

k_vivek@dnaindia.net