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.