MORE SEX IS SAFE SEX: THE UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM OF ECONOMIC

More Sex Is Safe Sex: “The Unconventional Wisdom of Economic” By Steven E. Landsburg

More Sex Is Safe Sex: “The Unconventional Wisdom of Economic” By Steven E. Landsburg

Column began in the summer of 1996 an article entitled "More sex is safer sex" in which Landsburg argued that HIV would spread less quickly if relatively chaste people each took on multiple sexual partners. At the bar on this night, he wrote, this disease with no singles would then make the pool of sexually active adults safer. The article was based largely on the academic work of another economist, Michael Kremer, theorizing that the spread of AIDS can be slowed down in England, when all with less than about 2.25 partners got around a bit more (McClintock, 2001).

This study is one of the earliest examples of imperialist movement of the economy profession. Over the last decade or so, economists are increasingly poking his fingers into other disciplines, including epidemiology, psychology, sociology, winemaking and even football strategy. These economists usually justify their expansion for two reasons: They say that they are better with numbers than most other researchers and richer understanding of how people respond to incentives.

Arrogant as these sounds, there is some truth to that. In addition, the public seems eager to form real social science practiced by economists. "Freakonomics", Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, has spent more than 100 weeks in the New York Times bestseller list, while Malcolm Gladwell, author of "Tipping Point" and "Blink", is arguably the country's most popular writer of fiction by artfully explaining the science behind everyday human interactions.

Landsburg, a professor of the University of Rochester, currently out with his record in the field, "more sex is safe sex," based mainly on his columns in Slate. Introductory article is an expanded version of the first column. From there he jumps into a series of illogical arguments based on his own observations or on research of other economists.

"That's odd indeed," Landsberg says. "Throughout the industrialized world, unemployment and home ownership go hand in hand." Unemployment is low in Switzerland, where renting is the norm, and high in Spain, where most people own their own homes. Painting takes place in different regions of the country, and it persists for a long time. As home ownership rises, so does unemployment. Landsburg considers a couple of harmless explanations - coincidence, ...