The mere mention of SEX should bring some blog hits this morning. In The Best of the New World of Economics, Richard McKenzie and Gordon Tullock begin their chapter on "Sexual Behavior" with the sentence: "If you are at all typical of readers of this book, these are the first words that you have read." (Irwin, 1989, p. 102)
Many years ago now I wrote a review essay of Richard Posner's Sex and Reason (1992). I entitled that essay "Good Economics, Bad Sex (and even worse philosophy)." My argument in that essay was that the power of Posner's work can be seen in how he applies basic economics to explain a variety of behaviors. The poverty of Posner's work can be seen in his inability to discuss the meaning of those behaviors. His commitment to positivist economics constrains Posner from addressing meaning by design. He considers such questions as "unscientific" and thus religious and feminist writings have no serious contribution to make on the subject of human sexual behavior. Unfortunately for those concerned with legal and policy treatments of the most intimate of human interaction, the public passions are fueled by conflicting interpretations of the meaning of sexual acts and not merely the act itself.
Part of the Austrian criticism of positivism as applied to the human sciences is that an appropriately subjectivist stance must account for the shared meanings embedded in the phenomena under examination. The first task of the social scientist, Ludwig Lachmann often told us, was to render social phenomena intelligible in terms of human purposes and plans. It was our second task to trace out the consequences (intended and unintended; desirable and undesirable) of our actions. The issue of intelligibility versus predictability is a subtle but important distinction between the Austrian and mainstream conceptions of the scientific project in modern economics.
If economists tread lightly in the field of sexual mores and behaviors, others from alternative ideological and philosophical positions are not so constrained. Recently the New York Times picked Toni Bentley's The Surrender as a noteworthy book for 2005 --- Bentley believes she has found God through sexual submission, and in particular her book is a celebration of the trust and freedom found in a particular sexual act. (I'll let you look that up) Rather than an anti-feminist track, Bentley believes her book could only be written by a feminist. In this regard, her theme is not that much different from the great individualist feminist and libertarian writer Wendy McElroy's XXX or Sexual Correctness.
In an earlier post on this blog I discussed the endogenous supply of bad behavior induced by questions of incentives and signals. This seems to be evident in the sexual behavior of artists -- who it turns out have more sex than the rest of us. Is this due to something in the artistic gene, or is it due to expectations of what it means to be an artist and the fact that this behavior is tolerated in those deemed creative so that those who want to be viewed as creative behave that way even if they are not all that creative in reality?!
One thing is for sure, sex is not going away and perhaps a praxelogical analysis could be conducted that steers between the positivism of Posner and the nonsense of warmed over marxist feminism.
P.S.: I should point out that my good friend Steve Horwitz has in fact thought long and hard about many of these issues, taught for many years a course on human relationships to freshman, and he published an essay on "The Functions of the Family in the Great Society," Cambridge Journal of Economics 29 (5) September 2005.
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