Dollars and Sex

by Marina Adshade

  This steady rise in university enrollment has had some important consequences for those who are not able to take that step. The first consequence is that as a greater proportion of the population becomes university educated, individuals who do not have a postsecondary education have become increasingly marginalized and, to a certain degree, stigmatized. The stigma of not having an education extends into the workplace as employers progressively have come to expect workers to have a university education, even for jobs that could be productively filled by high school-educated workers. The result is that workers without a postsecondary education are shelved in low-paying, and extremely low-skilled, jobs.

  Low-skilled jobs have what economists call a very flat earnings profile—the wages low-skilled workers are paid increase very little as workers gain years of experience. Because of this, low-skilled workers are not penalized for workforce interruptions (such as taking time out of the workforce to care for small children) in the same way as high-skilled workers. High-skilled workers, who see their pay increase as they gain years of experience, both lose their current income and see a decrease in future income when they take time out of the workforce to care for their children.

  The second consequence for workers on the low end of the growing educational divide is that the gap between the wages paid to skilled and unskilled workers has increased substantially over time. Firms are investing more in technologies that complement the talents of educated workers at the expense of technologies used by less-educated workers. This means that not only are the wages of educated workers increasing but also the wages of low-skilled workers are falling. In fact, by some estimates, the wage of an average worker with less than a high school education fell by 30 percent for men and 16 percent for women between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s.

  Given that education has become so important both for finding employment and for earning a living wage, you might be tempted to think that young women and men would carefully avoid any circumstances that might prevent them from staying in school—circumstances like having a baby. If that were the case, premarital sex and promiscuity among adolescents and young adults should have fallen as education has become increasingly important. The reason it hasn’t is that for many young people there is no hope of ever continuing in school regardless of the choices they make. This is true, of course, because postsecondary education is not freely available to everyone.

  We will return to this relationship between promiscuity and education in more detail in chapter 7, when we talk about the sexual behavior of teenagers. Suffice it to say for the time being that a young adult’s willingness to be promiscuous is tied to the cost of tuition in college—when tuition fees are high, youth tend to engage in riskier sexual behavior. This observation explains, in part, why the teen pregnancy rate is so much higher in the United States than it is other developed nations with more affordable postsecondary education.

  Of course, tuition is not the only reason why some students can reasonably expect never to go to college, and for those youth, those who don’t anticipate a bright future, the costs of promiscuity are significantly lower than for other students who do look forward to a good education and a higher income.

  One of the reasons women have abstained from sex in the past was fear that having a sexual history would send a bad signal to any potential future husband. It said: This woman will not be a faithful wife. Premarital sex has become the social norm, perhaps, but marriage prospects still play a role in the sexual choices made by unmarried woman and men.

  WOMEN (OR MEN) WITH CHILDREN NEED NOT APPLY

  Ten minutes on a dating site should be sufficient to convince anyone that having had a child before marriage will limit a lonely single’s options on the marriage market. I have seen more than one online dating profile in which the prospective lover had written something along the lines of “What part of ‘NO WOMEN WITH CHILDREN’ don’t you people understand?”

  I don’t read many women’s online dating profiles, so I don’t know if women are as upfront as men are in stating their preferences for a childless partner, but I do know that many women, especially younger women, will not date a man if he has had a child. Being a father suggests to women that a man has fewer resources and time than otherwise unencumbered suitors.

  HOW “LOVING THE ONE YOU’RE WITH” MAY NOT MAKE YOU HAPPY

  Throughout this discussion, we have just assumed that there are some benefits to promiscuity; after all, if there weren’t, the risk would not be worth taking. If there is a benefit to promiscuity, though, then it is worth asking if people with more sexual partners are happier than those with less. Economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald have the answer to this question. They asked sixteen thousand Americans how happy they were (on a scale of one to three) and found that promiscuity, in general, does not make for happier people.

  Don’t get me wrong; sex makes people happy, and the more sex people have, the happier they are. Sex particularly makes women happy—happier, in fact, than any other activity. More-educated people are made happier by sex than less-educated people. Younger people are happier in general but are not made any happier by sex than are older people. Being lesbian or gay doesn’t make you any more or less happy than anyone else, but it does mean having slightly more sexual partners.

  The point is that while more sex makes people happier, having more sexual partners does not. The happiest people are those with just one sexual partner and, in fact, the more sexual partners they have had in the last twelve months, the less happiness people reported.

  Of course, we don’t really know what this happiness measure is capturing. For example, people who are unhappily married are more likely to cheat and, as a result, have more sexual partners. They aren’t necessarily unhappy because they are promiscuous, but they may be promiscuous because they are unhappy. People who have had a series of failed committed relationships in one year would look promiscuous, but who could blame them for being unhappy?

  The real test of whether or not having one additional sexual partner makes people happy is that people make that choice, frequently. We called this evidence revealed preference, because by choosing to have one additional sexual partner, for example, a person has revealed that they prefer to pay the expected costs for that experience over other possible choices they might have made.

  That isn’t to say they won’t regret later having made that decision; it just means that facing disappointment was a risk they were willing to take.

  As a friend once said to me, “Why would I date a man who is off buying his children snowsuits when he could be spending that money on me?” (Honestly, I don’t make this stuff up.)

  If a child is the result of a causal fling, rather than a committed relationship, even potential partners who otherwise wouldn’t have minded having those children in their lives think otherwise. The problem for women is that having had a child both before marriage and outside of the context of a serious relationship suggests to potential future husbands that a woman is promiscuous. For men who have children with whom they are not involved, it suggests to future wives that they are both promiscuous and unwilling to live up to their obligations.

  People might reasonably avoid promiscuity for fear that it will later affect their marriage prospects. Given that, a reasonable explanation for the increase in promiscuity is that people feel they are less likely to ever marry regardless of their behavior, or at least if they do marry it will be so late in their life that a few years of promiscuous behavior in their youth will seem less important.

  As I said in the introduction, the general feeling among the current generation of youth is that marriage is not necessary to ensure future happiness. According to the Pew Center for Research, among 19- to 29-year-olds who had no children and had never been married, only 66 percent say they want to marry at some point in their lives. Most of these young men and women are likely to marry at some point in their lifetimes; the share of the population that marries at some point in their lives has
stayed fairly stable over the decades at around 90 percent. But over the past fifty years, the marriage rate (the share of the population that is married at any one point in time) has fallen for everyone.

  No one group has been affected more by the decline in marriage rates than the group of men and women who are both low skilled and, as a result, low paid. If we go back to our previous example that I used to illustrate the economic costs of promiscuity, and assume that our fictional woman would have had only a 48 percent chance of marrying, even without a mistimed pregnancy, then really the expected cost of promiscuity for her is something like this:

  Even without an improvement in the effectiveness of contraceptives, her cost for premarital sex has fallen by more than half, making it even less likely that she will choose to wait to have sex in the hopes of marrying a man with a good income.

  Of course, this is a simplified view, but many other factors that we might consider will only increase the incentives men and women have to be promiscuous. For example, knowing that they will not marry until they are in their late 20s or early 30s makes it more likely that men and women will have not only one premarital sexual partner but several before they meet the person they will eventually wed. The ease with which couples can now divorce has reduced the need to find a partner who has the characteristics we would look for in a faithful mate, such as virginity, because the credible threat of ending the relationship makes it easier to enforce fidelity. More independent decision making by young adults has effectively eliminated the chance that the families will force them to marry their sexual partners against their wishes, freeing us to have sex with people whom we hope will make good sexual partners but know would make lousy spouses.

  Just the fact that young adults are expected to live away from their parents for a period before they marry, if they are spending time in postsecondary education for example, increases promiscuity in that it reduces parental supervision and some of the shame associated with having premarital sex.

  All of these economic factors, and no doubt others, have contributed to a change in social norms that have freed many to engage in riskier sexual behavior. But while promiscuity among heterosexuals is increasing, it seems that one community is actually experiencing a decrease in promiscuity: gay men.

  SAME-SEX ATTRACTION, A LOVE STORY

  In light of new changes to marriage laws in many countries and in response to greater societal acceptance of same-sex relationships, it seems that gay men are opting less for casual sex and instead having committed relationships.

  In 1996, a U.S. Gallup poll found that 68 percent of respondents indicated that they were opposed to laws that would allow same-sex couples to be married with the same rights as in opposite-sex marriages. Just fifteen years later, many people have changed their opinion on same-sex marriage; only 44 percent of respondents indicated that they were opposed to legalizing same-sex marriage. Likewise, tolerance toward same-sex preferences, in general, has been on the rise. For example, the percentage of people who believe that sexual relations between two adults of the same gender are not wrong at all has increased from 15 percent in 1991 to 43 percent in 2010.

  In the United States, the acceptability of same-sex relationships varies not only from person to person but also from state to state. We will talk more about who does, and does not, support same-sex marriage in chapter 6. However, for now those state-by-state variations in same-sex marriage laws and in tolerance toward same-sex relationships create a possibility for economists to test the following hypothesis: in states where people are more tolerant and/or have no ban on same-sex marriage, members of the gay community engage in less promiscuous behavior. Thankfully for us, testing this hypothesis this is just what Andrew Francis and Hugo Mialon have done.

  They prove the hypothesis by testing to see if states in which the public is less tolerant of same-sex relationships have more places in which gay men might meet for anonymous sex (parks, beaches, restrooms, and other public grounds that have been identified by a gay men’s travel magazine). They find that a 20-percentage-point rise in tolerance decreases the average number of such meeting places in a state by about four places. If that doesn’t convince you that promiscuity has decreased, a similar increase in tolerance (20 percentage points) is also associated with a decrease in HIV of one per hundred thousand of the population. They find the imposition of a same-sex marriage ban increases the HIV rate by between three and five new HIV cases per hundred thousand.

  This result may seem counterintuitive; after all, I have just argued that the destigmatization of premarital sex has increased promiscuity among heterosexuals. So why should the destigmatization of sex between people of the same gender decrease promiscuity within that community? It is because an increase in tolerance changes both the way that currently openly gay men behave and encourages other men who had previously been fearful of revealing their sexual orientation to come out of the closet, so to speak.

  For men who already have a gay lifestyle, increased tolerance makes it possible to have committed relationships without incurring the costs that intolerance imposes (including, incidentally, being paid a lower wage because of their sexual orientation). Alternatively, for men who have chosen to either have no sex life or to act as heterosexual men, increased tolerance makes it possible for them to be openly gay without incurring the costs intolerance imposes (including, incidentally, not being able to marry and have a family).

  So promiscuity in the gay community falls when the stigma attached to same-sex preference declines, both because men who would otherwise have been promiscuous are more likely to be in a relationship and because men who are less promiscuous by nature (for example, men who are more family oriented) are willing to join that community.

  FINAL WORDS

  I know this methodology seems to impose too much rational behavior on an event that often begins with a man and a woman meeting in a bar and ends with some poor hungover individual stumbling home in her high heels in the blinding morning sun. I am not suggesting that all individuals do this promiscuity math every time they have sex, or ever, for that matter. In economics, all that matters is that people behave as if they are solving a cost-benefit problem—they may not calculate the expected cost of promiscuity, for example, but when economic factors change costs, men and women respond by making different decisions than they might have otherwise.

  This economic approach helps us understand not only why we have experienced a liberalization of sexual values over the twentieth century, but also how the growing gap in incomes between the rich and the poor has led to high rates of unintended pregnancies among poorer women. It is because those women behave as if they have estimated the low probability of finding a husband who can afford a wife and family, or the probability that they will be able to go to college and have a rewarding career, and they have found that the benefits of casual, risky sex exceeded the expected costs.

  DOES PROMISCUITY MAKE NATIONS RICH?

  There is a huge amount of variation in the level of promiscuity among nations. According to evolutionary biologist David Schmitt, for example, the most promiscuous nation in his forty-eight-nation study, Finland, is more than two and a half times as promiscuous as the least promiscuous nation, Taiwan. As an economist, I can’t help but wonder if some of the variation in promiscuity among nations is related to variations in national income.

  Social psychologist Roy Baumeister finds that countries with greater gender equality are also those with more promiscuity, measured in terms of greater number of sexual partners, more one-night stands, lower age at first sex, and a more liberal attitude toward sex before marriage. And since there is a strong correlation between gender equality and national income (it is the wealthiest nations in the world that allow women the greatest independence), this evidence substantiates my view that the wealthiest nations are the most promiscuous.

  Why might there be a correlation between national wealth and promiscuity? It might simply be the case that promiscuity is a luxury that i
s affordable to more people in richer nations. After all, in poor living conditions, you likely have other things to occupy you rather than seeking multiple sexual partners.

  This probably isn’t the right approach because within all nations there are both rich and poor individuals. If the argument held that promiscuity was the result of high incomes, we would expect high-income individuals to be more promiscuous than low-income individuals within the same nation. This is generally not the case.

  In my mind, the answer to this question comes down to what makes a nation wealthy in the first place, and one of the reasons for this is that they have legal institutions and social norms that promote innovative activity.

  For example, a few national qualities that encourage economic growth are openness to new ideas, trust, and a willingness to accept risk. It is possible that these same cultural characteristics that have allowed nations to become wealthy are the same ones that encourage promiscuity. After all, what can be more trusting, and more risky, than sex with a stranger? It is probably not high levels of national income that lead to high levels of promiscuity, but rather other characteristics of a free society that lead to both high income and high promiscuity.