More Sex is Safer Sex

Read a book by Steven Landsburg called More Sex is Safer Sex, and Other Surprises. It was a really refreshing take on application of economics into everyday life, situations and problems and how having more sex can prevent the spread of AIDS.

The main story which Landsburg wrote was:

Imagine a country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female partners per year. Under those circumstances, a few prostitutes end up servicing all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease on to the men; the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of those monogamous wives were willing to take on one extramarital partner, the market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast enough to maintain itself, might well die out along with it.

More interestingly, as I was surfing around for more information about the book, I found a post by Alex Tabarrok on June 19, 2008 regarding another book which validate's Landsburg's theory:

In The Wisdom of Whores (see also my earlier post) Elizabeth Pisani says that such a country exists, it's Thailand, and the results of more sex were safer sex - exactly as Landsburg argued. Here's Pisani's story:

Thailand used to fit the the classic 'virtuous girls, philandering boys' model. At the start of the 1990s, 57 percent of twenty-one-year-old men in Northern Thailand trooped off to the brothel to do their philandering. More than half the sex workers who soaked up their excess energy were HIV-infected....

Then...the Thai economy boomed. Girls were getting better educations than ever before...Educated girls were waiting longer before getting married, but not before having sex. By the end of the 1990s, 45 percent of girls aged 15-21 in northern Thailand admitted to having sex with boyfriends before marriage, compared to less than a tenth of that in a nationwide survey in 1993.

...So at the end of the decade, we have a lot more premarital sex and not all that much condom use with girlfriends. But now that these young, cash-strapped guys can have sex without paying, they've stopped handing over cash for sex. By the end of the 1990s, only 7 percent of young men were paying for sex, and HIV prevalence in sex workers had come down too.

....In short, more women having premarital sex equals less HIV.

Pisani cites neither Landsburg nor Kremer so I believe her account is independent. Note that Pisani also credits Thailand's successful condom program.

Hence more sex is safer sex! Really quite the interesting read, even for non economically inclined people as it is written in a easy to understand way and the issues discussed are easy to relate to, from sex to pollution and clearing up fallen leaves on your porch.

Besides wanting to share an interesting book in this post, I would also like to share a method to be more financially efficient.

I read the book at the bookstore....

The WHOLE book.

Free(to me).

So in a world where knowledge is power, I gained some knowledge for which I did not have to pay for in money.

But is it really free?

Next up!

I will dissect the costs involved in spending an afternoon at the bookstore readings books!

Stay tuned!