- if everything in the world is explained by supply and demand, and
- if human decision-making is the same for all decisions- you don't have an economic side of the brain and a non-economic side
then this work is a real contribution. But I have my doubts :-)
It's like Gary Becker's theories on the rationality of committing suicide - when your net present discounted value of future experiences is less than zero it's the only rational thing to do. But - what if rationality is overrated here?
I'm a child of the enlightment - but I don't think it's a sin to float the idea that the brain's hardware doesn't necessarily produce rational outcomes. I'm not suggesting any spooky spirit mechanisms - I'm sort of a Darwinian and think that the brain was optimized for survival. There's certainly overlap in the skills you need to survive and the skills you need to be a rational economic actor but they are not the same.
In some ways I have no doubt that everything *could* be described by supply/demand/rationality/optimization - but to translate the human experience into this limited vocabulary requires some subtlety and skill. And then it's only a model. The model may have its uses but it will have limits too.
My obnoxious take on this sort of thing is that the language of economics provides an alternative way to describe human behavior that gives the illusion of understanding and power. There is *some* understanding there and you can get some limited predictive power for some domains. But knowing the limits of the model is key and I haven't seen much work there (there's the Tverskey and Kahneman tradition - which I liked when I read it many years ago - but from what I've seen they are looking at cognitive limits on what most can agree is 'economic' behavior) What we need here is what distortions happen when you are looking at cognition that involves a lot of personal history, shame, physical excitement, hopes for the future, &etc.
As a joke it's like the Godel jotd from the other day - but the problem here is that it's hard to model the system when you're inside of it. Economics fixes that problem by pretending that you're on the outside looking in. And then they forget to laugh at the joke.
On 3/10/06, Biju Chacko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
http://tinyurl.com/rn7x7
The Economics Of Prostitution
Michael Noer, 02.14.06, 12:00 PM ET
Wife or whore?
The choice is that simple. At least according to economists Lena
Edlund and Evelyn Korn, it is.
The two well-respected economists created a minor stir in academic
circles a few years back when they published "A Theory of
Prostitution" in the Journal of Political Economy. The paper was
remarkable not only for being accepted by a major journal but also
because it considered wives and whores as economic "goods" that can be
substituted for each other. Men buy, women sell.
