Dollars and Sex

by Marina Adshade

  But while educated women are becoming liberated to marry whomever they please, those same forces will essentially disenfranchise less-educated women from the marriage market and, potentially, push more children into poverty.

  One of the solutions is, of course, to allow wealthy men to take more than one wife—that is, institutionalize polygamy.

  I have argued that male income inequality encourages polygamy while female educational inequality encourages monogamy, so this suggestion that polygamy is the solution to growing female educational inequality is counterintuitive. But the claim that female inequality encourages monogamy depends on the assumption that educated women are a relatively scarce resource, which is no longer true. That suggests that, over time, having multiple educated wives will become “affordable” by wealthy men.

  Educating women in underindustrialized nations should discourage polygamy, but educating women at much higher rates than men just might encourage a movement in support of institutionalization of polygamy in industrialized nations.

  One final implication of this story is that the growing educational divide will contribute to the growing divide in household incomes of the rich and the poor. This is because while women may be better educated, men tend to be better paid than women at higher levels of education. As a result, households in which the wife is better educated than her husband will generally have a significantly higher income than households in which the wife is less educated than her husband because the former household will have two high-income earners.

  As more and more households are of the first variety—those in which the wife is better educated than her husband—the already wide gap between the rich and the poor households will widen even further.

  FINAL, FINAL WORDS

  I have argued that almost every option, every decision, and every outcome in matters of sex and love is better understood by thinking within an economic framework. Whether or not you have been convinced of that, I hope that the stories that I have told here—fictional, empirical, and theoretical—have persuaded you that we are all, throughout our lives, playing on our own markets for sex and love. When all is said and done, though, I hope that when your market clears, you have found a buyer who greatly exceeds your reservation value for a mate. After all, I’m nothing if not a romantic at heart.

  Since we have been talking about macroeconomic variables, I thought I’d conclude with an idea that was suggested to me by a group of enthusiastic students in my Economics of Sex and Love class. This idea is not about how macroeconomic variables can influence sexual behavior but rather how sexual behavior can help us better understand macroeconomic variables.

  You may have heard of the Big Mac Index that is produced annually by The Economist magazine. The point of that index is to make exchange rate theory more palatable to readers by giving a real-world example of how well purchasing power parity—the theory that exchange rates adjust to make the level of goods and services that can be purchased with a unit of currency equal between countries—holds around the world. The Economist does this by comparing the price of a uniform, tradable good—a Big Mac—in about 120 different countries. The idea is that by converting the foreign price of a Big Mac into U.S. dollars, we should be able to determine if a country’s currency is either over- or undervalued relative to the U.S. dollar.

  Okay, so here is the big idea: the Blow Job Index.

  Blow jobs are, I assume, a fairly uniform service, and they have to be at least as tradable as a Big Mac. After all, I am certain that sex workers cross borders looking for higher wages more frequently than do McDonald’s workers. And, while tourists may eat at McDonald’s when visiting a foreign country, they don’t exactly flock to the countries where they can find the cheapest Big Mac; sex tourists vastly outnumber Big Mac tourists. These two factors, one supply and the other demand, should make the price of a blow job at least as internationally competitive as the price of a Big Mac.

  I have no evidence as of yet, but I think that if we created this index, we would find that the prices charged for this uniform service do not converge between countries. There may be only one input in the production of a blow job, the sex worker, but numerous other factors contribute to how expensive a blow job is in one country relative to another.

  For example, social norms around casual sex should influence the market price of a blow job, so we would need to correct for prices in cities where casual sex is freely available. Marriage institutions also play a role, so we would need to correct for prices in a polygamous societies. And when women outnumber men. And when foreign wives can be easily imported. And when Internet technology reduces blow-job search costs.

  You get the idea. Many of the economic conditions that influence the informal markets for sex and love we have been discussing all along also influence another market for sex—one in which value is more easily measured—the sex trades.

  Perhaps this is a discussion we can have another day.

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