Missed Connection

You, standing in the door of the subway. Your wavy hair falling over your face, an army-green blouse revealing unbelievable curves. Not all Asian girls can pull off this look.

Me, explaining basic subway etiquette to you, loudly enough for everyone in the area to get the benefit of my advice.

Let's get drinks sometime.

A Little Silliness in the New Yorker

One small point about the Goldman piece: he is a little sloppy with fact-checking, although I blame his editors. Anyway, they let this passage slip through, see if you can spot the discrepancy:

By eight o'clock on the frigid morning of June 24th, members of the press, in winter coats, were gathered in front of a hospital ambulance entrance, in the ramshackle Buenos Aires neighborhood of Caballito.

The frigid morning of June 24th. Winter coats. Ha! This is such a howler that I can only laugh and shake my head.

Children of the Dirty War

A stunning piece by Francisco Goldman in the New Yorker this week, describing a bizarre facet of the "dirty war" in Argentina. It turns out that when pregnant women were disappeared, or when disappeared women got pregnant after being raped in captivity, the captors would allow the women to bear the babies, even though the women were usually ultimately killed. The children were "adopted" (today the Argentines are more comfortable with terms like "appropriated" or "stolen") and raised by members of the regime, by friends of the regime, and sometimes by innocent couples who didn't realize what was going on.

After laws were passed to prevent the prosecution of those responsible, the babies presented something of a loophole: because the regime had never acknowledged the baby-theft, these cases were not covered by the law. The result was that legal charges could be brought against the "adoptive" parents when the children were identified, though charges could not be brought against, say, the men who killed the mother. As DNA testing came online, a great deal of drama ensued. Children had been raised, in some cases, by the killers of their mothers, and in other cases by couples who knew the killers and were given the children as a favor. The children thought of the couples as their (adoptive) parents. And to cooperate with the DNA testing meant potentially sending the only parents these children had ever known to prison. Bear in mind that (until the laws were repealed and investigations resumed) those couples were the only people who could go to prison for the atrocities of the Dirty War. Goldman notes: "Women ran into their torturers and rapists in supermarkets." The torture was pretty brutal:

One former detainee told Feitlowitz, "Our bodies were a source of special fascination. They said my swollen nipples invited the 'prod'"—the electric cattle prod, which was used in torture. "They presented a truly sickening combination—the curiosity of little boys, the intense arousal of twisted men."

Sometimes the mothers were able to nurse their newborns, at least sporadically, for a few days, or even weeks, before the babies were taken from them and the mothers were "transferred"—sent to their deaths, in the Dirty War's notorious nomenclature.

For decades, those children constituted the only avenue for justice in Argentina. Read the whole story, it is fascinating. As a side note, the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations took roughly the positions you would expect in the Dirty War. No wonder the U.S. is so well-loved around the world.

[Update: changed a few passages in the post for clarity. You can hear Goldman discuss the piece here.]

An App for That

Erik Hanson wrote a tweet (not sure that link will work) about an app for a tablet in which the camera is used to take pictures (video?) of passersby, who are then inserted into some kind of first-person shooter game. Or at least, I think that's what was going on.

It poses an interesting problem for the law, I suppose. Here's another possibility along the same lines: an app called "Take a Picture, It'll Last Longer" that records video of people and later adds whatever erotic elements the user wants, if any (it would presumably take a lot of processing power to do something sophisticated, but a simple version would be to insert the person's face into a pre-existing porn video).

Of course, people are already free to do this within their heads - you can't go out in public without running the risk that someone will use a mental image of you as masturbation fodder (well, actually, I can go out in public without running that risk, but most people can't). And I suppose the same goes for pictures taken in public. But since the hypothetical app is explicitly designed to facilitate this behavior, I wonder if it crosses a legal or moral line. Particularly, I suppose, if the video is of a child - though remember, we're talking about innocuous video that is later remixed. Although, if you end up with something that resembles child porn, I think that is clearly illegal under existing law.

None of this will matter once the pangasm has arrived.

Evading Justice

John Demjanjuk is dead. Late in life, Demjanjuk was convicted by a German court of working as a concentration camp guard during the Holocaust and was sentenced to 5 years in prison. However, he died in freedom, having been released pending appeal.

Five years in prison for serving as a concentration camp guard. A shorter sentence than would be given to a common murderer (or perhaps even a car thief or drug dealer). A longer sentence than was served by practically any Nazi anywhere.

Competition for Thee but not for Me

I am sometimes critical of capitalism and the values it propagates, but there is no denying that markets are the best way to organize most economic activity. But note this dynamic: the ideal outcome for most people is to be sheltered from market forces while everyone else is subject to them. When everyone has to compete for your business, you will probably enjoy a wide selection of reasonably-priced goods and services. But it is very unpleasant to compete for your livelihood.

And so people have developed all kinds of mechanisms to shelter themselves from competition - monopolies, unions, tenure, laws that make it difficult to fire people. One measure of a society's commitment to markets is the extent to which it undertakes to force the market on people by prohibiting their attempts to evade it (e.g., anti-trust laws). Of course, it is not clear that it is optimal to maximize competition - if people are risk-averse, then maybe some level of protection from markets is justified, even if it distorts prices and reduces output.

This raises the possibility that social democracy can bring large benefits by giving everyone the same shelter from market forces, while otherwise breaking up all efforts to evade them. Uniform and non-discriminatory generosity, on the one hand, and total exposure to market forces, on the other. You still have price-distortion, since people's incentives are blunted by the social safety net, but a social safety net is probably morally required in any case. Tying the social safety net to a complete lack of anti-competitive distortions may be a very good trade. In fact, one possibility is that if you try to carry out a pro-competitive project in the absence of a strong social safety net, you will fail because people will be too determined to resist. Only by softening the market can we make it acceptable. This is one way to view the argument that the New Deal was about "saving capitalism from itself." Maybe the same logic applies to Bismarck's reforms.

There is a problem of political economy: it is possible that the only way to sustain social democracy is to have powerful labor unions to provide a constituency against fiscal conservatism. Then the unions will prevent you from carrying out the pro-competitive project, at least when it comes to unionized sectors of the economy. I am not sure how this has played out in the social democracies of northern Europe, except that Denmark supposedly has a very flexible labor market in which it is easy to hire and fire people. If that's true, it seems like a very good outcome.

You Are a Product That Must Be Sold

In his classic New Yorker piece on Ron Popeil, Malcolm Gladwell points out that Popeil comes from a family of kitchen-appliance sellers with an interesting philosophy of product design:

They believed that it was a mistake to separate product development from marketing, as most of their contemporaries did, because to them the two were indistinguishable: the object that sold best was the one that sold itself.

Think about that for a moment. You might imagine developing a product as follows: first, identify a need for a new product. Then, design a product that optimally meets that need, taking into account cost of production, etc. Finally, market the product to the public.

What Popeil and his family realized was that capitalism actually calls for a different approach. Marketing is "too important to be left to the generals." The product must be designed with an eye to convincing people that they need it, even at the expense of functionality or cost of production (Gladwell does not make this last point explicit, but it seems inevitable - otherwise there simply wouldn't be any trade-offs). See below for some examples from Gladwell. Of course, I don't think this approach originated with the Popeils. However, it may be increasingly common as society becomes more affluent, because a higher and higher percentage of our income is spent on products that we must be convinced that we need. One does not expect a tremendous amount of marketing to go into the design of shoelaces.

But what is disturbing is that this approach is not confined to products in the marketplace. People organize their lives for maximum "marketability" so as to compete more effectively in status games - they do not separate life decisions from the marketing of themselves. And they embrace marketability even at the expense of other important considerations. Of course, one can be more or less effective at this - nakedly angling for status is itself looked down on. But as in so many other areas, we can't escape the disgusting logic of modern life even in our most private domains. Though I suppose that in this case capitalism is not to blame - our self-promotional tactics long pre-date it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Postscript: Here is one way Popeil incorporated marketing into product design.

Why does [the pitch for the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ - set it & forget it!] work so well? Because the Showtime--like the Veg-O-Matic before it--was designed to be the star. From the very beginning, Ron insisted that the entire door be a clear pane of glass, and that it slant back to let in the maximum amount of light, so that the chicken or the turkey or the baby-back ribs turning inside would be visible at all times.

. . .

Ron understood that the perfect brown [skin of a chicken cooked in the Showtime] is important for the same reason that the slanted glass door is important: because in every respect the design of the product must support the transparency and effectiveness of its performance during a demonstration--the better it looks onstage, the easier it is for the pitchman to go into the turn and ask for the money.

Curves and Sexiness

This is a quick note on the plausibility that a decrease in demand for men on the LTCR market might actually increase the price for men on that market. It is a response to Sarang's comment to the previous post.

Let's start with a traditional supply/demand model. Take apples. Farmers grow apples and supply them to the market. Consumers buy apples for food. For our purposes, it doesn't matter how the apples move from orchard to table.

So we have a supply curve and a demand curve. The supply curve ordinarily slopes upward with price (a higher price induces an increase in the quantity of apples supplied). The demand curve slopes downward with price (a higher price induces a decrease in the quantity of apples demanded). One can work this out with varying degrees of rigor, but the basic logic should be easy to grasp. Note that the slopes of the curves depend on a number of factors, and may be different over different time intervals. On any one day, a farmer may simply sell all of his ripe apples, regardless of the price. So on any given day, the supply curve may be flat. However, over a longer time horizon, farmers will enter or exit the market depending on the expected price of apples, and so the curve will be upward sloping. (This can get very complicated, but for our purposes it doesn't matter.)

Now, as Sarang has noted, in very rare circumstances you could have an upward-sloping demand curve. A good with an upward-sloping demand curve is called a Giffen good. I'll just let Wikipedia do the explaining.

An important concept is that the supply curve and the demand curve shift independently. This is not always strictly true - one can imagine exotic circumstances in which that is not the case - but generally one thinks of a shift in one curve as constituting a shift along the other curve, which itself does not shift. This is almost universally the assumption in introductory economic courses, and I think it is the default assumption generally. So you can see why Sarang calls foul when I violate it, or when I try to invoke a Giffen good (the existence of which has never been confirmed, to my knowledge).

The LTCR market is not like the market for apples described above. That's because the LTCR market interacts dynamically with the sex market. A "price change" in the sex market will induce shifts in curves in the LTCR market, but "prices" are likely to change whenever there is a move into or out of the LTCR market. That means that it is not exotic for a shift in one curve to induce a shift in the other - it is, in fact, highly likely.

So I am not just invoking Giffen goods here. I am not just raising rare hypothetical cases. The curves in the LTCR market do not function the way they do in the apple market.

In Soviet Russia, You Have Model with Sex

Again lifting Sarang's comments from a previous post:

Well, but this is exactly the entire point! As everyone in this argument has been pointing out, a model (I would say the default model) of the SR is one in which WL removes a workplace constraint on women that had been keeping singleness artificially low (and artificially inflating demand for husbands), thus leading to the SR. No jobs, no SR. The further effects are the system equilibrating to the new, lower levels of demand. On this picture, the story you want to tell -- "supply of husbands decreased b'se of SR and therefore SR was bad for women" -- is missing the crucial demand-shock element. What your corn post implies is something like, "women's lib decreased demand for husbands and the SR decreased supply of husbands; these are separate phenomena." However, on the default worldview this is an absurd thing to say, because _the entire story_ is about the system adjusting to a decrease in demand for husbands. And the ultimate effect of a collapse in demand for husbands is unlikely to be an increase in the price of husbands rel. to baseline.

Now you are free to disagree with this admittedly oversimplified model (I offer it mostly for purposes of contrast). But to the extent that it is plausible, separating the SR from women's lib doesn't make sense.

So Sarang had referred to women's liberation leading to the sexual revolution before, but I had not grasped that in his model, the sexual revolution is really nothing but a subset of women's liberation: new job opportunities led to a fall in the demand for men in the LTCR market, possibly followed by a fall in supply of men in the LTCR market. I wish that Sarang had made his model explicit earlier (though I am not sure it would have changed my conclusion - see below).

I was confused because I had originally made the explicit assumption that "the sexual revolution consisted of (A) reducing society's promotion of LTCRs, and (B) reducing society's stigmatization of women's participation in the sex market." Sarang's story only deals with norms and stigma incidentally, if at all, whereas in my model they are the whole story. (I was responding, originally, to the idea that "sexual mores were loosening" during the 60's - something that, I pointed out, is not strictly good for women. I got some pushback on this point, and so I "formalized" it into a model. I never realized that Sarang was using a different model. Not to put words in his mouth, but Sarang may argue that norms and stigma respond to the underlying economic reality - that they are mere epiphenomena, and that jobs drove everything. A discussion for another time. Suffice it to say that I have been thinking in terms of my stated assumptions all along.)

So now it becomes clear why from my viewpoint the sexual revolution doesn't get credit for the improvement in women's job opportunities, while for Sarang this seems silly because in his view the sexual revolution consisted of the improvement in women's job opportunities (as they played out in the LTCR and sex marketplaces). In other words, I was thinking of the sexual revolution as a move from the LTCR market into the sex market, with no significant effect on jobs. Sarang was thinking of the sexual revolution as a move from the LTCR market into the labor force, with casual sex as a side-effect. Note that these models could each be somewhat "accurate" - it could be that some women entered the sex market because of relaxed norms, while others entered the sex market because they no longer relied on an LTCR for economic self-sufficiency. In practice, for many women it was probably a bit of both, with no easy way to disentangle the contributing factors.

But anyway I'm not sure it boils down to anything more than a modeling/terminological issue. Whether you give the sexual revolution "credit" for women's improved career opportunities depends on whether you confine the term "sexual revolution" to the increase in casual sex. In my model, this comes naturally; in Sarang's model one could draw the line either before or after the increase in job opportunities. Sarang finds it intuitive to "bundle" the two together. I am not so sure - after all, a woman with economic opportunities need not leave the LTCR market or change her sexual behavior at all. In fact, imagine a woman who has no desire for sex outsides of an LTCR. If, as a result of women's liberation, she has career opportunities such that she has no economic need for an LTCR, would we say that her increased bargaining power in the LTCR market is attributable to the sexual revolution? This seems like a stretch to me, but I admit this is a fairly subjective question. I'll just say that I view it as more intuitive to define the sexual revolution in sexual terms - changes in sexual behavior and norms.

But assume that Sarang's model is 100% right and mine is 100% wrong (that is, norms played no causal role - the entire shift was driven by a shift from the LTCR market to the labor market). I don't think Sarang is correct in his implicit assumption that the supply response of men in the LTCR market must be overwhelmed by the initial negative shock to the demand for men. That would be true in a traditional supply/demand model (in which we would expect no shift in the supply curve at all, merely a shift along the supply curve). However, in this case changes in the sex market feed back into the supply of men in the LTCR market - the supply curve shifts as men depart for the sex market. Depending on parameters, it would be possible for women to undergo an "immiserating" decrease in demand for men in the LTCR market (that is, the "price" may shift in favor of men, a counter-intuitive result).

So I stand by my ceteris paribus arguments, but I acknowledge they become less compelling if you adopt Sarang's model in lieu of mine. But even if you use Sarang's model, and even if you include intra-LTCR-market effects within the "sexual revolution," this does not mean women have gained bargaining power in the LTCR market as a result of the sexual revolution, and it does not mean that the incentive for men to be "suitable" has increased.

Strawberry Games and Sex

I am going to lift the following comments from Sarang into a post:

Corn subsidies and sugar quotas are logically independent, even if they happen to occur together. In my worldview (and Steph's, and maybe Alan's), the sexual revolution was a direct and essentially inevitable consequence of jobs for women. Thus the parallel fails.

. . . a better parallel from my perspective is the following. You argue that one should leave strawberries lying about on one's coffee table indefinitely because they smell good. Alan and I object that they do not, because they begin to rot. You say that this is irrelevant because you're investigating the smell of strawberries while ignoring the effect of putrefaction. You add that this is not an intellectually disreputable practice.

So a quick note - Sarang has indicated that he is tired of repeating himself endlessly and will shut up - so silence on his part should not be construed as agreement with my points.

Now, my points.

1. Sarang does not clarify the distinction between logical independence and causal independence. I take it that eating 20 pieces of candy cannot be regarded as logically independent from eating an even number of candies. One simply can't, as a logical matter, do the former without doing the latter. Whereas eating 20 pieces of candy is very likely to cause you to feel ill, but this is not entailed as a logical matter.

If this is the distinction, then I think one can treat the sexual revolution as logically distinct from the women's liberation movement, even if the boundary is not clear, and even if the sexual revolution is regarded as a subset of the women's liberation movement. One might still regard the two as causally linked, but I think this has been assumed rather than established. (This is a reasonable assumption, of course - see below - but the extent and nature of this causal relationship is not obvious to me.)

2. No one would deny that the women's liberation movement and the sexual revolution share common causes. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that the one could not take place without the other. However, these are not Boolean variables - women's labor force participation is not either "yes" or "no," but rather is expressed as a percentage. Moreover, beyond crude numbers like labor force participation, women can be more or less fully integrated into the workforce, and given more or less opportunity for advancement.

Likewise, one can imagine different types and degrees of sexual liberalization. One can imagine a society in which premarital sex is "deregulated," but adultery is still highly stigmatized. One can imagine a society in which serial monogamy is respected in all its forms but non-monogamy is not. One can imagine a society in which most traditional norms are retained and even enforced, but only in increasingly mild ways (instead of being ostracized for adultery, a woman simply loses some amount of status).

Therefore, even if you regard women's liberation and the sexual revolution as corollaries, one might still fruitfully ask questions like, "What is the effect of sexual liberalization, holding workforce opportunities constant?" or: "What is the effect of improved career opportunities, holding sexual liberalization constant?" In real life, these things may never be held constant, but they still might vary in ways that yield different outcomes. For instance, I suspect that if adultery were completely non-stigmatized, it would weaken long-term commitments, with a variety of consequences. If one of those consequences were that women had a harder time getting advanced degrees (perhaps because advanced degrees are often subsidized by spouses), then one might like to know this, even if the women's liberation movement as a whole makes it vastly easier for women to get advanced degrees. (So in other words, one might say, "The women's liberation movement is unambiguously helpful to women obtaining advanced degrees, but the elimination of anti-adultery norms is mildly harmful to women obtaining advanced degrees." One might say this even if, in fact, the women's liberation movement inevitably leads to the abandonment of all norms against adultery. And of course, it may be the case that women's liberation is consistent with any number of different norms about adultery - it may even be the case that adultery is more strongly and consistently stigmatized in a post-women's-liberation world. To take the position that one simply cannot ask questions about adultery norms without analyzing the entirety of the women's liberation movement strikes me as silly.)

3. So I don't think I'm playing strawberry games when I insist on doing ceteris paribus analysis of the sexual revolution.

A Terrible Beauty is Corn

Imagine an argument between me, on the one hand, and Alan and Sarang, on the other. I argue that corn subsidies, whatever their merits, have contributed to obesity by making empty calories cheaper than they would otherwise have been. I argue that this has increased people's incentives to consume empty calories. (For the sake of this discussion, let's ignore those instances in which the government pays farmers not to grow corn.)

Alan responds that in fact people's incentives to consume empty calories have not increased, because empty calories have actually become more expensive as the result of government policy. Alan notes that sugar quotas increase the price of sucrose, which is a sweetener that competes with high fructose corn syrup. Assuming fructose and sucrose are substitutes, an increase in the price of sucrose should lead to an increase in demand for fructose, which could actually overwhelm any increase in supply brought about by the corn subsidies (that is, corn syrup could end up more expensive than it would be in a free market).

I might reply that I was just talking about corn subsidies. Holding other things constant, corn subsidies have led to cheaper empty calories. Maybe sugar quotas have caused empty calories to become more expensive, and maybe this has overwhelmed the effect of the corn subsidies, but I am holding sugar prices constant in my analysis.

Sarang and Alan note that corn subsidies and sugar quotas are closely linked: both involve the use of government policy to promote the interests of farmers. The two policies may have even been enacted in the same legislation. It might be very difficult to imagine a world in which corn farmers benefit from subsidies but sugar-cane and sugar-beet farmers don't benefit from quotas.

So then, what is our answer to the question, "Ceteris paribus, do corn subsidies make empty calories cheaper?" If, with Alan and Sarang, we answer, "No," then we are taking the view that there basically is no such thing as a "corn subsidy," as traditionally understood (that is, money that is paid to farmers based on how much corn they grow). Rather, there is something called "agricultural policy," and it is the only relevant unit of analysis. Indeed, it is what we mean when we use the term "corn subsidy."

So anyway, James has written a series of blog posts about how corn subsidies have led to increased incentives to consume empty calories. Sarang responds that James's response about holding sugar prices constant is point-missing because the point is just that James's model of corn subsidies is at odds with reality because it's missing the dynamics of the price of sugar.

I want to make two observations:

1. It may be valuable to consider the effect of corn subsidies (defined narrowly) separately from the effect of other policies, even policies that are almost certain to accompany corn subsidies (such as sugar quotas). This is standard in economics, and frankly I am not accustomed to thinking of it as a disreputable practice.

2. Even if it is not "valuable" in some deep sense to model corn subsidies separately from sugar quotas, it is still perfectly possible to do it for the sake of discussion, or for the sake of sorting out one's ideas. I might concede that any such discussion is entirely academic, since farm policy is in the hands of our mal-apportioned Senate, which will under no circumstances adjust corn subsidies while leaving everything else constant. And even if the Senate did such a thing, surely something would happen in the world that would shift sugar prices one way or another, or shift gasoline prices, or any number of things, ensuring that it will never be the case that only corn subsidies change and that everything else is truly equal. Nevertheless, it may be fun or engaging to ask the question, even if the circumstances underlying the answer (everything else being equal) will never obtain in the real world.

A Stone to Trouble the Living Stream

Michel Houellebecq, Whatever:

I've just turned thirty. After a chaotic start I did very well in my studies; today I'm in middle management. Analyst-programmer in a computer software company, my salary is two and a half times the minimum wage; a tidy purchasing power, by any standards. I can expect significant advancement within my firm; unless I decide, as many do, to sign on with a client. All in all I may consider myself satisfied with my social status. On the sexual plane, on the other hand, the success is less resounding. I have had many women, but for limited periods. Lacking in looks as well as personal charm, subject to frequent bouts of depression, I don't in the least correspond to what women are usually looking for in a man. And then I've always felt a kind of slight reticence with those women who were opening their organs to me. Basically all I represented for them was a last resort. Which is not, you will agree, the ideal point of departure for a lasting relationship.

There is an interesting parallel to Sarang's second reason to avoid having to deal with friendly attractive women at work: "(2) They might be of the kind that are _into nerds_ -- which, for any sufficiently self-loathing nerd, is a turn-off (qua confirmation of one's own nerdiness)."

It is only a parallel, since being a nerd is not the same thing as being abjectly pathetic. But it suggests that there may be a sort of psychological barrier to mutually-beneficial transactions, much as there is when Westerners shy away from paying poor people in developing countries miserable wages to do dangerous, degrading work. Maybe another way of thinking about it is that the transaction is not mutually beneficial when you take into account the revulsion that the transaction arouses.

[Update: note that the minimum wage in France appears to be €9.22, so at current exchange rates, 2.5 times the minimum wage works out to just above $30/hour.]

The Sexual Revolution: Very Bad for Polar Bears

I have identified a cost of the sexual revolution that had not occurred to me: a massive increase in greenhouse gases and the accompanying global climate change, including both changes in weather patterns and in oceanic chemistry. When you add that to the huge increase in obesity, it actually starts to look as though the costs of the sexual revolution may exceed its benefits.

Now, one might say that you should isolate the effects of the sexual revolution from other changes that happened to coincide with it. For instance, if anything we might expect the sexual revolution to lead to a decrease in obesity, since people spend more of their lives actively looking for sex. So ceteris paribus the sexual revolution may have made us slimmer. And yet I count obesity as a cost - why?

Because obesity trends, as well as global climate change, are driven by shifting patterns of economic activity, without which the sexual revolution almost certainly wouldn't have occurred. Industrialization made us much richer and shifted people from the countryside, with its rural values and high search costs, to cities and suburbs. In cities, there are "thick" markets for sex, and non-traditional social institutions support sporadic, anonymous interactions (for instance, the rule of law replaces basic reputational control mechanisms in preventing cheating - necessary because in the urban environment, a lot of interactions are not "repeat games," whereas in small towns everything is a repeat game).

So industrialization facilitated the sexual revolution, but alas, it also caused a massive increase in our output of greenhouse gases. Likewise, the shift from manual labor to sedentary lifestyles contributed to the explosion of obesity, but it also promoted the sexual revolution (again, by putting people into urban areas where the sexual revolution could take off).

I will continue to think of negative trends that coincided with the sexual revolution and were in some sense connected to it, and hopefully what will end up happening is that our evaluation of the sexual revolution will boil down to, "Are humans better off now than they were 50 years ago?"

Not That Many Women are Sex Workers

Alan addresses the question of men's incentives to be "suitable" for an LTCR post-sexual revolution and concludes that in fact men's incentives to be "suitable" were not weakened by the sexual revolution. Why? Because while the sexual revolution may have decreased the supply of men in the LTCR market, it also decreased the demand for men, by creating career opportunities and economic independence for women.

The problem is that the sexual revolution did not obviously create any real career opportunities for women. True, some women found employment in prostitution or pornography, but it is very difficult to believe that these jobs account for more than a small fraction of women's economic empowerment. Rather, it seems likely that expanded career opportunities in manufacturing, services, medicine, law, business, and technology account for the vast bulk of women's increased economic self-reliance.

So while the sexual revolution seems to have reduced the supply of men in the LTCR market, it does not seem to have brought about any non-negligible reduction in the demand for men (at least, not through the channel Alan identifies). Of course, women's economic opportunities have expanded greatly over the last 50 years, but to give all the credit to the sexual revolution and none to the women's liberation movement seems, well, crazy. The question is not whether the last 50 years have been good for women - of course they have - but whether the sexual revolution has been on balance good for women. That is a closer question.

False Consciousness in the Federal Republic

From "Anti-Climax," by Jonathan Franzen, in the April 21, 1997 issue of the New Yorker:

If Americans today are especially anxious, the consensus seems to be that it's because of "changing sex roles" and "media images of sex" and so forth. In fact, we're simply experiencing the anxiety of a free market. Contraception and the ease of divorce have removed the fetters from the economy of sex, and, like the citizens of present-day Dresden and Leipzig, we all want to believe we're better off under a regime in which even the poorest man can dream of wealth. But as the old walls of repression tumble down, many Americans—discarded first wives, who are like the workers displaced from a Trabant factory; or sexually inept men, who are the equivalent of command-economy bureaucrats—have grown nostalgic for the old state monopolies. What are The Rules if not an attempt to re-regulate an economy run scarily amok?

The success of Die Linke suggests either that some Germans have experienced negative effects from the fall of Communism or that there is substantial false consciousness among German voters.

[Update: Check out the geographical distribution of Die Linke's electoral support. Do you see any patterns?]

Collecting Cases

I am going to keep a running list of links on the general subject of sex, narcissism, losers, writing, and the Great Male Novelists (with an emphasis on Houellebecq, who I assume without deciding is a GMN), so that I have them all in one place. I will keep adding (and possibly re-arranging) links as I find them. I should note, I don't endorse all of these, though I do think they all have something to contribute. I guess I could put them in rough order of my view of how much they contribute, but I kind of like them the way they are arranged.

DFW on Updike

Updike on Houellebecq

Houellebecq at home

Elaine Blair on Houellebecq (specifically The Map and the Territory, but wide-ranging)

Ben Jeffery on Houellebecq (specifically The Map and the Territory)

Scott Esposito on Ben Jeffery's book on Houellebecq and "depressive realism"

Katie Roiphe on depictions of sex by different generations of "great male novelists" (and Ross Douthat's response)

Elaine Blair on depictions of sex and of losers by the young generation of "great male novelists" and by Houellebecq