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    More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics
    Unavailable
    More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics
    Unavailable
    More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics
    Ebook303 pages3 hours

    More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics

    By Steven E. Landsburg

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    With his long-running 'Everyday Economics' column in Slate and his popular book, The Armchair Economist, Steven Landsburg has been leading the pack of economists who are transforming their science from a drab meditation on graphs and charts into a fascinating window on human nature. Now he's back and more provocative than ever with surprises on virtually every page.

    In More Sex is Safer Sex, Professor Landsburg offers readers a series of stimulating discussions that all flow from one unsettling fact. Combining the rational decisions of each of us often produces an irrational result for all of us. Avoiding casual sex can actually encourage the spread of diseases. To solve population pressures, we need more people. In his tantalizing, entertaining narrative, Landsburg guides us through these shocking notions by the light of compelling logic and evidence and makes suggestions along the way: Why not charge juries if a convicted felon is exonerated? Why not let firemen keep the property they rescue? As entertaining as it is inflammatory, More Sex is Safer Sexwill make readers think about their decisions in unforgettable ways -- and spark debate over much that we all take for granted.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster UK
    Release dateSep 4, 2008
    ISBN9781847375988
    Unavailable
    More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics
    Author

    Steven E. Landsburg

    Steven E. Landsburg is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester. He is the author of More Sex Is Safer Sex and The Big Questions. He has written for Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and Slate. He lives in Rochester, New York.

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    Reviews for More Sex is Safer Sex

    3.5/5

    73 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      On the bandwagon with Freakonomics[/i]. Thinking about things from an economic standpoint – i.e., from the way the world actually works as opposed to the way numerous interest groups would like it to work – is always a laudable pastime; the catch being that economists usually don’t know the way it actually works either. In this case, most of the hypotheses proposed are pretty reasonable – alas, though, they are just hypotheses and testing them by experiment ain’t gonna happen.
      Ironically, the lead essay in this collection (and also the title for the whole book), More Sex is Safer Sex[/i][/url], is one of the weakest. It was presumably chosen on the assumption that a book with “sex” in the title will sell better; if only my first scientific paper had been titled “Chronostratigraphic accuracy of Ordovician ecostratigraphic correlation and sex” I might be famous today. Author Steven Landsburg clumsily explains his premise with an anecdote involving a hypothetical office Christmas party; a later explanation works somewhat better – suppose you have a community of 1000 married couples and five prostitutes. The women are all content to remain monogamous; the men, however, “need” an additional sexual partner annually. The prostitutes will get a workout and potentially infect everybody with STDs. However, if the women or a reasonable fraction of them cheat, all the men can be satisfied and everybody will stay healthy. Landsburg comments that of course there are some assumptions; I should think so.
      The remainder of the essays are similar; some ideas that make you think; many unstated assumptions or failures to account for confounding factors. An interesting one involved a way of thinking about outsourcing jobs overseas; suppose John Doe invents software to perform some valuable service – the example Landsburg uses is automatically analyze MRI scans. People who were previously employed analyzing MRI scans lose their jobs, but for everybody else MRI scan analysis is now cheaper. On investigation, however, it turns out that there’s no fancy software in John Doe’s setup at all; all it does is send the MRI scans to doctors in Mumbai who analyze them and send back the results. In one case, John Doe is a clever inventor and consumer benefactor; in the other he’s an evil and unscrupulous business owner sending American jobs overseas. However, the two situations are economically identical. Landsburg expands somewhat by commenting that John Kerry’s website contained references to keeping “American” jobs for “Americans”, presumably to the enthusiastic approval of his supporters; if, however, Kerry had stated he wanted to keep “white” jobs for “whites”, there would have been a different reaction. The conclusion is “Think Globally” only applies to polar bears, not jobs.
      Landsburg’s comment on Third World child labor will also raise hackles among the politically correct; the issue is not one of 13-year old Egyptian girls working all day weaving carpets versus 13-year old Egyptian girls going to school; it’s between weaving carpets and starving. Landsburg is especially hard on American college students with expensive educations and high-tech gadgets “protecting” children in Third World countries from earning enough to eat.
      Pretty good overall except for the unfortunate title essay; these were originally written for magazine or newspaper consumption and are thus short and to the point, with the caveat that this sometimes leaves some of the assumptions unstated. Picked mine up in the remainder bin at Barnes and Noble for $2.70 and well worth it.
    • 4/5
      I read The Armchair Economist and More Sex is Safer Sex back to back and remember them both as cost/benefit analysis stretched to its utmost, replacing all spiritual values. Which can be fun if you do not take it too seriously. There are also some suggestions for establishing added incentives for judges and juries, as well as firemen, that reminds me of Rube Goldberg contraptions and are all good for a broad smile. In short I think Landsburg is good, very good, with a tongue in his cheek that I suspect he just might not have.
    • 4/5
      I still have not read Freakonomics but this book is supposededly similiar. I absolutely loved this book! I really liked the section on "how to fix everything else". It just seems like such simple solutions to everyday economics, but sometimes it is so radical that it doesn't seem like it would work.
    • 2/5
      Interesting, if you like economics you must read Freakonomics !
    • 3/5
      _More Sex is Safer Sex_ prods you to think differently about some entrenched ideas, and this new way of seeing spills over into other everyday questions. It gave me plenty of entertaining nuggets to debate with my husband. If you try to read the book as an actual argument for setting public policy, you'll likely be exasperated with Landsburg, but this is not his intent. He is not arguing for what the laws and your behavior should be, but instead for how you can think about these decisions. On the whole, I found the book too light and trivial, more armchair economics than macroeconomics, but I blame myself for not cluing into the title and setting my expectations correctly.
    • 5/5
      I don't know if I agree with some of the conclusions that the author reaches, but I definitely like him expounding how he reached them.* Explaining why parents are 10% more likely to be divorced if they have 3 girls vs. 3 boys* The idea that citizens should have two votes, one for their district, and another for whatever district they want (to cut down on pork spending)* The idea that if non-promiscuous people had more casual sex could lower the number of STD infections.(The author didn't mention it, but it seems like it'd be worth investigating if boys are more likely if the woman climaxes. That could be a cause for both the marriage succeeding and the boy being born)