La concubina del economista

Mar 22, 2016 Robert Skidelsky

LONDES – En las últimas décadas, la economía ha estado colonizando el estudio de actividades humanas hasta ahora consideradas ajenas al cálculo formal. Eso que los críticos llaman «imperialismo de la economía» ha dado lugar al surgimiento de la economía del amor, del arte, de la música, del lenguaje, de la literatura y de muchas otras cosas.

La idea unificadora que subyace a esta extensión de la economía es que independientemente de lo que haga la gente —se trate de hacer el amor o de fabricar artilugios técnicos— procura lograr los mejores resultados con el menor costo. Estos beneficios y costos se pueden reducir a dinero y la gente, entonces, siempre busca la mejor rentabilidad financiera para sus transacciones.

Esto va en contra de la popular separación de actividades entre aquellas en que es correcto (y racional) considerar el costo y aquellas en que la gente no lo hace (y no debiera hacerlo). Decir que los asuntos del corazón están sujetos al frío cálculo implica, según los críticos, equivocarse. Pero en el frío cálculo, replican los economistas, reside exactamente la respuesta.

We hope you're enjoying Project Syndicate.

To continue reading, subscribe now.

Already have an account? Log in

Support High-Quality Commentary

For more than 25 years, Project Syndicate has been guided by a simple credo: All people deserve access to a broad range of views by the world's foremost leaders and thinkers on the issues, events, and forces shaping their lives. At a time of unprecedented uncertainty, that mission is more important than ever – and we remain committed to fulfilling it.

But there is no doubt that we, like so many other media organizations nowadays, are under growing strain. If you are in a position to support us, please subscribe now.

As a subscriber, you will enjoy unlimited access to our On Point suite of long reads, book reviews, and insider interviews; Big Picture topical collections; Say More contributor interviews; Opinion Has It podcast features; The Year Ahead magazine, the full PS archive, and much more. You will also directly support our mission of delivering the highest-quality commentary on the world's most pressing issues to as wide an audience as possible.

By helping us to build a truly open world of ideas, every PS subscriber makes a real difference. Thank you.

Subscribe Now

Robert Skidelsky

Writing for PS since 2003
178 Commentaries

Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University. The author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, he began his political career in the Labour party, became the Conservative Party’s spokesman for Treasury affairs in the House of Lords, and was eventually forced out of the Conservative Party for his opposition to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999.

new comment has been posted. new comments have been posted.

0 Comments on this paragraph, 20 Comments on this article

Talal Serhan Mar 29, 2016

Economics can't be exempted from formal calculus, otherwise it would be nothing more than baseless speculations. In fact, with "economics imperialism" there is no place for true love and livable art and music, if they are, only, considered as transactions. Love, certainly, is not a cost-reducing mechanism.
I wonder, which comes first? The health and safety of the nation's fertility, or that of those poor broken women forced, due to unfair conditions, to the dark world of prostitution.
Does Europe, really, need to regulate this inhumane, menial activity to the soul of women, or does it need to work hard toward reestablishing and strengthening marriage? The more prostitutes are available, the less is the need to marry and raise normal and stable children.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Richard Wilk Mar 28, 2016

Economics imperialism means that people studying economics in other disciplines read what economists write, but economists never read economic anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, etc.. This is very aggravating,especially when economists win prizes for "discovering" something that has been argued and accepted in other fields for years. The Society for Economic Anthropology had Becker come and speak back in the 1980s, but he did not stay for the discussion. Same with Douglass North. They were happy to talk to us, but they clearly did not think it worth listening to anything we had to say. Lynn Ostrum was a happy exception - welcoming me and many other non-economists at her workshop, but of course... she was a political scientist.
My textbook in economic anthropology (Economies and Cultures) was reviewed by one economist, who trashed it because of technical errors in microeconomics (a section vetted by several economists), without addressing the fundamental challenges to rational choice theory.
The discussion of prostitution here is interesting...but sex was probably commodified already in the Bronze age, and some sage was trying to forbid it on moral grounds. This is a collision between economic and moral values that continues today - and the balance between these values tips one way or the other. Given the resurgence of moral economics in the USA lately (not to mention political economics in the hands of the Donald), we should not expect things to change much in the USA. Both the far left and the far right place values above economic rationality, for different reasons of course.
Richard Wilk
Indiana University
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Richard Stewart Mar 27, 2016

@Odyssios Redux 'leaves all power in the hands of the seller' raises the question - why don't sellers double their prices?
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Richard Stewart Mar 27, 2016

"Like all markets, the sex market needs regulation, particularly to protect the health and safety of its workers."

Wrong. All markets do not need regulation. Come to think of it, almost no markets need regulation. They get it anyway, of course, from politiians who never have to pay the price of it.
- Jose araujo Mar 28, 2016
  
  70%-80% of the markets don't fulfill the axioms of perfect competition. If you sum Health, Education, Security, and the natural monopolies (utilities) share on the GDP, you come to the conclusion that only 20-30% of the goods can be traded freely in the markets.
  
  The axioms of perfect competition are: Market atomicity, product homogeneity, no market barriers, perfect information and resource mobility.
  A new reply to this comment has been posted.
- Odyssios Redux Mar 27, 2016
  
  No markets need regulation? There should be no inspectors of weights and measures, no attempts to regulate toxic components (lead, for random instance), no regulation of other forms of toxicity such as led to the 2008 collapse? Self regulation leaves all power in the hands of the seller. don't tell me 'the marketplace' is self-regulating - in any but a crudely Darwinian sense. Payday lenders, for instance. The counterexamples to your claim are numerous.
  A new reply to this comment has been posted.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Dick Burkhart Mar 27, 2016

The one point that Skidelsky missed is that often prostitutes are hooked into their work by drug addictions, not just economic desperation. Decriminalization and regulation would make a big difference here.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Cary Fraser Mar 27, 2016

Unfortunately, the pursuit of "economics imperialism" has helped to transform the field of economics into the intellectual equivalent of mortuary science.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Odyssios Redux Mar 27, 2016

This is a fascinating topic, and one that has fallen foul of the worst (fundamentalist puritanism, with fear and loathing of sex) and best (genuine concern for sex-workers souls, let alone bodies), aspects of religion. Well, the Three Monotheisms, anyhow. Societal expectations (completely unreasonable and unattainable, in my experience) of 'utter fidelity' to a partner, or equally utter abstinence in the absence of one, are also impediments to rational discussion of sex-for-sale (or short term lease, anyhow).

There is a solution to most of the difficulties. Prostitution - the sale of sex for relief or recreation- should be legalized, licensed, regulated and - no small matter, Mr. Osborne - taxed. The demand will last as long as the species (possibly any sexual species). It will be met, legally or otherwise. History is loudly on my side in this.

But what of the sex workers? What indeed? How many workers in say the garment industry, are happy strivers, content in safe and nurturing workplaces? Or miners of anything from coal to uranium? But there seems little of the sustained indignation at their situation, even within the communities these trades are practiced. Yet look at the fairly regular news of collapsed factories, or mines, and you'll see these workers' lot is not a happy one. Yet nobody seriously suggests there there should be no such occupations. Health and safety regulations- yes; and urgently so. And more than presently obtain. And so with sex.

No, it may appear beady-eyed and unfeeling to see it this way, but this is a classic case of demand and consequent supply. There are well-known and practiced understandings of such things, which apply no less here. As with any market, there should be protections for both sex-worker and customer. Just as there are product/service protections for so many less controversial products.

But you can no more have a winnable 'war against sex' than one against drugs - or terror. We can be sure of one thing: war produces more deaths than victories. Reason, and compassion, provide alternative solutions to perceived difficulties with all of these. Now the supply of these qualities, is a matter of urgency. Possibly the difficulty is with the demand side.
- Dick Burkhart Mar 27, 2016
  
  Good response.
  A new reply to this comment has been posted.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Jim Cobbe Mar 27, 2016

This strikes me as a very shrewd and insightful comment, which had not occurred to me before. Thank you for this paragraph, it is a good point -- a substantial fraction of the labour force in most countries perform their jobs reluctantly is my guess.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Yoshimichi Moriyama Mar 25, 2016

I wish to read presentations of our society and civilization by sociologists here at the Project-Syndicate. Because sociology makes us see differently from economics while the latter or economics blinds us to important matters and problems.

We see things with eyes or eyes anad glasses. Our sight is dependent on them; they are indispensable. We see society with economics. But we can see it with sociology, too. These two disciplines present different visions. Sociology makes us see differently from economics. Major problems that we face are visible only through sociology, anthropology, etc. Keynes was a social philosopher concerned with social problems before he was an economist who dealt with them from the viewpoint of economy. Roy Harrod once commented upong Bertrand Russell, a mathmatician, that he lacked mundane and secular knowledge and could not have done the work that Keynes did.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Jose araujo Mar 24, 2016

Salt water economic dystopia at its best.

I wouldn't call this theory sophisticated, and its a perfect example on the failures of salt water economics that instead of trying to study the world and human behaviors its more worried on building absurd math models.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Yoshimichi Moriyama Mar 24, 2016

Economics has been colonizing the study of human activities hitherto considered exempt from fomal calculus. Where else could Cary Becker have spent most of his career as an economist but at Chicago University?
What a sort of world we live in ! What a sort of world we still persist in going on to make!
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Steve Hurst Mar 23, 2016

'Becker argued that selecting a partner is its own kind of market, and marriages occur only when both partners gain. It’s a very sophisticated theory, relying on the complementary nature of male and female work, but which tends to treat love as a cost-reducing mechanism.'

This is baloney, if that was the case divorce would never happen

As for the intellectualisation of the sex trade mechanism, that is even more dubious and appears to have followed a blood rush from the brain to elsewhere
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Richard S. Stone Mar 23, 2016

This is in the nature of an analysis that makes so much sense it will never prevail. And from what I can see the Nordic abhorrence of prostitution drives the Norwegian men (at least in my experience) to tropical climates to find available women. Thus in the end they are simply exporting the buyers to other places. But then the so-called victims are not Nordic, so what do they care?
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Adolfo Villanueva Mar 22, 2016

"There is, of course, a strong ethical argument against prostitution" I would like very much to read Mr Skidelky's "strong ethical argument" (pimping excluded), in a world mostly governed by financial system's interests.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Marius Van Andel Mar 22, 2016

Irrelevant to the extreme . . . .
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Avraam Dectis Mar 22, 2016

.
This is a subject that will never see wide agreement.

Some people can be bought, others cannot imagine it.

Some people process love concepts on the left side of the brain, others on the right.

Some people, for the right price, would marry someone they never met or agree to the torture murder of a family member. Others could not imagine such a thing.

They will always disagree.
.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Walter Gingery Mar 22, 2016

Not the last word on the subject, to be sure; but thanks for taking it on.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.