Sex and unemployment

Never let it be said that economists deal only in trivia. Tyler Cowen asks an important question: can economists shed light on why people don't have more sex?
This is a subject on which I'm expert -  lack of sex, not economics, that is. So here's my take.
There are lots of parallels between dating and the labour market. In both, people are looking for matches. The reasons why matches can fail to happen in labour markets - resulting in unemployment - are often reasons why sex doesn't happen. Here are five:
1. High search costs. if something generates high utility but is rare, it must be because it is expensive. And sex is expensive. It's not just the financial costs - fancy restaurants - that matter. There's also time. Clemens Westerhof, a former coach of Nigeria, once said: "It's not the sex which tires out young players. It's the staying up all night looking for it."   Then there are health risks (speaking of football reminds me of Rio Ferdinand) And then there's the morning-after embarrassment. There are three little words that mean so much in any relationship, but are often awkward to say: "your cab's here."
2. Reservation wages. Excessively high wage expectations can cause the unemployed to stay unemployed. Similarly, excessively high expectations for a partner can cause people to stay single. By the time a woman has downgraded her aspirations from Mr Right to Mr He'll Do I Suppose, a lot of offers will have been rejected.
3.  Miscalculating the benefits of search. The unemployed sometimes prefer to stay unemployed in the hope that they'll be able to find a good job. This can lead to lost opportunities, if you don't get the good job. Analogously, we've all wasted time futilely pursuing a gorgeous woman, thus missing the chances of copping off with one only slightly less attractive.
4. Segmentation. The fact that there's a vacancy for a chicken-plucker in Norwich is little use if you're a panel-beater in Droitwich.  Similarly, there's occupational and geographic segmentation by gender. Most workplaces are  male- or female dominated, but rarely balanced. And many eligible men live in London where women are ugly.
5. Signaling. Good workers can find it difficult to signal their qualities to employers, with the result that jobs go to bullshitters. Ditto in dating markets. It's difficult to signal that you are a great cook, reasonably well-off and fantastic in bed (All right, two out of three). This is one reason why so many men want to be famous. Which brings us back to Tyler.

Comments

[Jon Barnard]

Michel Houellebecq made a similar point in Whatever, or so at least did the narrator of the novel, who went on to discuss how income inequality in the labour market was mirrored by inequality of success in the sexual market. Is there a case to be made here for government intervention to correct market failure?

I must say I have to disagree with you about the attractiveness of London women; I noticed at least three absolute beauties on the way in to work today.

[Ian]

"I noticed at least three absolute beauties on the way in to work today."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4491563.stm

[Jason]

1. Search costs. This begs the question. An economist would say that biological urges shape culture in ways that economists ought to be able to understand. So the question here is why culture has not evolved to decrease these costs. (The market continually makes lame efforts to solve this problem with dating services and prostitution, but cultural reasons preclude success here.)

2. Reservation wages. Right on. I believe this is a biological imperative.

3. Miscalculating benefits. Sounds like a restatement of #2.

4. Segmentation. Interesting. I don't by the geographical segmentation argument, because there are plenty of single people who might benefit from having more sex in a thirty-mile radius from wherever you are. You can't get away from them.

I do like the idea that people put themselves in particular sex "market segments". But I think these segments have more to do with what music you listen to and where you hang out than your particular sexual skills. This is mainly a factor only because you know that sex partners are also companions that you'll tend to spend a lot of time with. I think that tendency is both cultural and biological.

5. Signalling. Feh. Admittedly it's a problem, since everyone has an excellent reason to lie. But again, a culture bent on developing good signals would have them.

Some new reasons:

1. Time-related difficulties. To avoid incurring the search costs every time you want sex, you establish a relationship with someone. But you still can't just have sex with that person whenever you want to. The value that person attaches to "sex right now" can fluctuate unpredictably over time. (It depends on the person; but I guarantee that people for whom this value fluctuates more, and is frequently negative, will have a great deal less sex. It might be inevitable that these people end up having less sex than they want, and so do their partners.)

2. Costs of breaking up. Suppose you accept that long-term relationships maximize sex value for investment. Now consider monogomous societies. For fundamental human-nature reasons, breaking up is almost inevitably a horrible experience on both sides. This is a fixed cost that makes people reluctant to enter relationships, and decreases the amount of sex people have; the fact that this happens at the end of each relationship makes people underestimate the value of establishing the next one.

3. Disease. Our cultural attitudes toward sex and our sexual mores have evolved to protect us from STDs. Hence they're down on promiscuity. And as a result, people have less sex. If you knew you could only have one job your whole life, you'd be motivated to hold out for the best possible offer--even at the cost of being unemployed (or self-employed ;-) for many years. And after you got a job, your boss would be less motivated to keep you happy with it.

[dearieme]

"in London where women are ugly": compared to Berlin?

[EasyJetsetter]

I live in paris. Still quite a few ugly people. Myself included. 10% unemployment. 0% not having sex. They're rabid.

[Dave Tufte]

I think you've gone off on only one part of Tyler's point.

Search is a good way to approach why people don't have much sex over the course of their lifetime. But it doesn't do anything to address why couples who are no longer searching have sex as little as they do.

Claiming that search costs reduce the incidence of sex implies that the absence of search costs should be associated with a drastic increase in sex. But all couples can attest to the fact that this phase doesn't last forever.

London women - my recollection from 1983-4 was that they were fine, except for rather large calfs. I never did figure that one out.

P.S. I'm not sure I pluralized calf properly, but I couldn't find a source that said that calves was anything other than more than one cow.

[Angry_Economist]

ugly short men and gorgeous women

SO!? what is the economic explanation for the one of the most baffling phenomena to puzzle me during my long years of singledom - that of seeing a gorgeous bird somewhere, only to realise she is dating a really UGLY SHORT GUY?

Do these guys deliberatly target women who are on the shelf and desperate?

[Monjo]

I heard women are attracted to self-confidence, these guys have nothing to lose by approaching a Claudia Schiffer-esque woman as no-one would give them a cat's chance in a Chinese restaurant. So they are free to approach the woman, swoon her and seal the deal.

[Andrew M]

I think we need to distinguish the question why people don't have more sex from the question why they don't have more sex with other people. To the first question, we should that they do have lots of sex--in the form of masturbation. To the second, I have no answer, but surely it has to do with the fact that for many people, even including some men, having sex with a person entails some changed emotions, which in turn changes the costs and benefits.

[Robert Schwartz]

In what alternate universe do economists live, where sex is cheap (let alone free)? When I was single it always cost a nice dinner in a fancy restaurant, not to mention all the ones that didn't work out, which probably tripled the all up costs. I have been married for 25 years now and I look back on my single days fondly, now all sex costs is my entire paycheck and a lien on my estate, such as it is. That is expensive. Very expensive!

[david]

government inention to save the market??? (laugh) I guess that would be
something like a govt takeover of match.com???
In a sense, the internet is a redistributor of the wrong people in wrong
place problem. I'm sitting here trying to write the sci-fi scenario in which
govt intervention was needed because even match.com (et al) wasn't
sufficient. hahaha

In France, the birth rate was
so low that there was an oversupply of childcare, then out came the govt
inducements and they have propped the childcare industry. But the
sex market? The French have always seemed very good at taking care of
that themselves.

[david]

government inention to save the market??? (laugh) I guess that would be
something like a govt takeover of match.com???
In a sense, the internet is a redistributor of the wrong people in wrong
place problem. I'm sitting here trying to write the sci-fi scenario in which
govt intervention was needed because even match.com (et al) wasn't
sufficient. hahaha

In France, the birth rate was
so low that there was an oversupply of childcare, then out came the govt
inducements and they have propped the childcare industry. But the
sex market? The French have always seemed very good at taking care of
that themselves.

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