Book review: Dollars and Sex

I just finished reading Marina Adshade's 2013 book, Dollars and Sex. The subtitle is "How Economics Influences Sex and Love", and Adshade essentially summarises a large number of research papers that use economic theory to investigate topics related to sex and love. The genesis of the book, apparently, was Adshade's teaching of a course on "the economics of sex and love". Probably we need more university courses like that!

The book is essentially an interesting collection of stories and research summaries (including, for instance, research papers that I have previously blogged about here and here and here). In reading the book, you'll learn why college students have less sex (on average) than non-college students of the same age (which seems hard to believe if you're a university student, but is supported by evidence!). You'll also find out why Bill Gates doesn't have a harem, despite having enough wealth and income to support many wives. And about the economics of infidelity (which references research by Bruce Elmslie, who was a visitor at Waikato some years back), where Adshade writes:

Infidelity is an economic story, but not for the reason you might have expected - that wealthy men are the most likely to be unfaithful to their wives - but because the decision to have, or not have, extramarital sex is the solution to a cost-benefit problem. The costs in this story are a function of several economic factors, including lost income in the case of divorce, while the benefits are, for the most part, biological.

I found the book to be a good read, but there were some surprising omissions and missed opportunities. For instance, in the section on marital infidelity, there was no mention of game theory. Even though Adshade talks about bargaining power within the marriage in several places (it is a recurrent theme in the book), it seems to me that an appropriate framework in several places includes some consideration of the strategic interactions of partners (i.e. game theory).

Also, in the section on online dating, there is no mention of adverse selection. Perhaps Adshade is taking a similar view to Paul Oyer in his book Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Economics I Learned from Online Dating (which I reviewed here), but it is difficult to tell. In my (brief) experience with online dating, adverse selection was a serious problem (and if you want to know more about adverse selection in online dating, read this post from 2015).

Adshade obviously takes a broad view of what economics can help us to understand (as do I!). However, at one point she notes that:

...economic inquiry has its limits, and explaining religious doctrine is not a bad place to draw the line.

The counterargument to that is, of course, that explaining religious doctrine using economics is exactly one of the things that Peter Leeson does (see my review of his book, WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird). Despite those issues, this is still a good book, and an interesting read for those looking slightly 'off-beat' applications of economics (of whom, I am one). In that case, it is a recommended read.