Stockings in your Hand, Panties in your Purse

Via Rafael, we have The Economics Of Prostitution. I love Gary Becker as an economist (I remember reading his paper with Stigler on how much you have to pay a cop to keep him from taking a bribe in senior seminar). I consider him a forerunner of Steven Levitt and his "Freakonomics" work. However, while admitting I haven't read his paper, just this article, I am not sure about how he can consider all of the factors that make up human relationships into hard-line, overriding theories. Is a wife really a low-cost provider? My dad sure buys my mom lots of shiny things...

This begs the question of why married men go to prostitutes (rather than buying from their wives, who presumably will be low-cost providers, considering that they can sell nonreproductive sex without compromising their marriage).

When considering cross-cultural and socio-economic differences in the world, I don't know if these kinds of generalizations are possible. Economists love to make games and then figure out, using pre-determined assumptions, how that economic agent will act. But because human relationships are all necessarily different (I think we all agree people marry for vastly different reasons even though most people take similar vows), I don't think we can even have basic assumptions. Love? Loyalty? Respect? Attraction? And as Dwight Yoakam reminds us, "baby, things change."

Of course, not but two posts ago I was commenting on selective breeding (which btw, Robert has determined that I am both artsy and analytical making me a universal breeder! Putting this on my resume for sure). This might be even another kink in the assumptions on this model (which again, I have no idea what they are). Economists assume the agent is homo economicus, simply rational and looking out for his own best interests, but we all know that rarely do people act this way. Especially in relationships. I can attest to that.