Economics of Sex and Love

Economics is usually pictured as the study of interest rates and share prices. Its method is broader: a way of examining how people choose when resources, time and options are limited. Applied to dating, sex and marriage, that method produces a field with a surprising amount to say.

Marina Adshade, a Canadian economist who has taught at Dalhousie University, has described in media interviews a course she created on this theme. The points below summarize those descriptions.

A first-of-its-kind course

The course on the economics of sex and love was presented by its instructor as unusual, with few earlier equivalents. Media outlets took notice, partly because of the novelty of an economics department offering the subject. She observed that campuses already handle the topic in fields from philosophy to anthropology, so what stood out was the economic lens.

What students covered

The syllabus ran to dozens of sessions, each with its own theme. Topics included how prices are set in markets such as prostitution, and how the cost of risky sexual behaviour can be estimated with value-of-life methods. A classroom experiment was used to illustrate findings from behavioural economics, including research suggesting that arousal can affect willingness to accept unfair offers. The emphasis stayed on economic reasoning throughout.

A companion blog

The instructor also wrote a blog that started out as a place for students to see course themes from a different direction, and the writing later reached a wider audience.

Answering the cynicism charge

Critics sometimes call the pairing cynical. The professor replied that economics does not assume money drives every choice. Its concern is the way choices get made once trade-offs appear. Online partner searches show this: filters for height, education, age or religion are choices, and couples who marry often turn out to be alike in earnings, schooling and looks. Economics here describes patterns rather than ranking love below profit.

Where the field is heading

Academic interest in the subject is not new, and it has grown from the long tradition of marriage economics associated with Gary Becker, from economists drawn to evolutionary biology, and from the large datasets created by the internet, which allow researchers to study partner choice at a scale that was not possible before.