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The economics of love and sex
Last week we talked about promiscuity and I gave you a chance to take a test to measure what psychologists call "sociosexuality"—which I referred to as promiscuity. When you took the test you didn’t get a score but instead found out the country where you would be most at home—based on your sexual ...
Here is a puzzle: if promiscuity has increased over the past century and if the cause of that increase was really a fall in the risk of pregnancy, then why have out-of-marriage births increased as well? Over the whole of the twentieth century premarital sex rates for women increased; from 6% in ...
Big Think has called August "The Month of Thinking Dangerously" and served up one radical idea each day in the Dangerous Ideas blog. The ideas started off dangerously enough, with bioethicist Jacob Appel advocating that the government spike our drinking water with lithium in order to cut the ...
Sex makes us happy (do I need to cite my source for that?), but how about 1970’s style love-the-one-you’re-with sex? You know the kind of sex that is preceded by fishing around in a bowl at a party for a set of car keys? Research suggests that promiscuity is not associated with increased ...
It's time to take a simple self-assessment test, which the International Sexuality Description Project—a team of more than 100 scientists—has administered in 48 different countries.* The test will take less than a minute, and will measure what psychologists call your “sociosexuality"—or, what I ...
A recent article has me worried; apparently there is a penalty associated with being a “sexy” professor.* Until now, all I had been worried about was that the mother of one of the students in my "Economics of Sex and Love" course would complain that I had taught her progeny how blowjobs are ...
For anyone interested in sex and economics, China is fascinating. It takes in 30% of the worldwide pornography revenue,* and prostitution income makes up 8% of its massive GDP**. I’ve just spent two (wonderful) months in China, and while sex and economics had nothing to do with my trip, I was ...
In December 2007, the city of Halifax decided that it had had enough rowdiness and started to impose minimum drink prices at bars in town bringing an end to dollar drinks in the city. It turns out that these laws might have a secondary beneficial effect, that of lowering risky sex and STI rates ...
Prostitution, very narrowly defined, is not a criminal act in my country, Canada. If we are in a private home and I want to charge you for sex and no one is else is profiting, the state has nothing to say on that. Most acts of prostitution are, however, criminal acts. We have an ongoing ...
Here is a tip for educated women hopelessly looking for love in the city; you are not the only educated woman having a hard time finding a man. It isn’t just that educated men are hard to find, although it is true that they are in relatively short supply. Ever since 1985 there have been more ...
In a recent interview in the New York Times Magazine, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner said that he was very proud that he had paved the way for middle-class couples to live together without being married. Well, thank you Hugh Hefner. Here the rest of us were thinking that this social change had ...
In light of yesterday’s decision by the Federal District Court in San Francisco to strike down a ban on same-sex marriage in California, why not ask the question: How does the legalization of gay marriage in a particular geographical region affect the HIV rate there? The prevalence of HIV is a ...
The dating website eHarmony had a free weekend last week, or so I was told by a friend who was presumably trying to be helpful. Economists find dating websites extremely useful, not to find the love of their lives (although they might be doing that) but because they provide an opportunity ...