There’s a very interesting thread of comments on gatorlog, on the economics of sex. Wow, it should be interesting. After all, economics is all about how to efficiently distribute and use scarce resources, isn’t it? Suddenly, I got interested and did some googling, to figure out that:

It all began with the research paper of Michael Kremer who’s a development economist — meaning he’s got nothing to do with the economics of sex. But, he wrote in 1994 an essay, Can having fewer partners increase prevalence of AIDS? I didn’t see it in full, but the abstract was enough to suggest that it’s something that you wouldn’t read at your leisure time.

Under asymmetric information about sexual history, sexual activity creates externalities. Abstinence by those with few partners perversely increases the average probability of HIV infection in the pool of available partners. Since this increases prevalence among the high activity people who disproportionately influence the disease’s future spread, it may increase long-run prevalence…

Then came the 1996 essay of Steven E. Landsburg, with the provocative title, More sex is safer sex, and the book (NYT excerpt). If you wanna see more of his essays, try this link.

Read through the comments on gatorlog; it’s quite entertaining. But, bear in mind that what one of the commenters said is a hidden assumption is not an assumption at all. In Kremer’s research, it’s a fact confirmed through research of cases in England. And, in case of Landsburg’s story about a country of monogamy (see below), it’s a hypothesis necessary to do the math. It’s a pure mental exercise, like math.

If multiple partnerships save lives, then monogamy can be deadly. Imagine a country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female partners per year. Under those circumstances, a few prostitutes end up servicing all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease on to the men; the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of those monogamous wives were willing to take on one extramarital partner, the market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast enough to maintain itself, might well die out along with it.

And, it’s economically solid, in that it doesn’t require us to assume anything about morality, to say the least.

Last note: It has nothing very few, if any, to do with the efficient distribution of scarece resources, whatever they are. It is all about how to economically control people’s behavior to get an optimal result. Conclusion? Give away condoms, like they do in some countries.