As we all know rock stars get an excess of sexual offers and as you might think is blindingly obvious, economists do not. It isn’t known as the dismal science for nothing you know.

Tyler Cowen looks at why people don’t actually have as much sex as one might think they woud or should…it is, after all, fun (mostly), free (mostly), healthy (if you’re careful) and one of the driving forces of hom. sap. Indeed, economists will often point to examples of competition in life, the desires for status and aggrandisement, as being driven by precisely this, the desire for further and greater mating opportunities.

Will Wilkinson points out that sex is not, in fact, cheap, as it takes a great deal of effort to find someone you want to have sex with who also wants to have sex with you (leaving aside the monetary versions).

David Tufte offers two further explanations both of which merit attention. As might be surmised from his job as an economics professor the discussion uses some jargon:

Specifically, most people have a frequency of sex that changes a
great deal over 1) their lifetime, 2) their time with the same partner,
and 3) even the time of year, week, or 24 hour day (I’ll leave month
out for obvious reasons).

To an economist this implies that there are huge changes in the
terms-of-trade between sex and other activities in which we might
partake. Either our relative enjoyment of sex fluctuates a lot, or the
opportunity costs of it fluctuate a lot. In economic jargon, either our
(internal) marginal rate of substitution of sex for other activities
changes a lot, or our (external) marginal rate of transformation for
other activities changes a lot.

He further shows his uber-maleness (is it something about Utah?) by spending all day thinking about sex (rather than just once every four seconds like the rest of us):

I’ve been thinking about this for a good chunk of the day, and perhaps sex is like fair (as opposed to free) trade.

Economists are great advocates of free trade. Voluntary exchange
(there’s that catchphrase again) between consenting individuals yields
gains-from-trade; that is, an objective sense in which both sides are
better off. Sounds a bit like sex too.

The great difficulty that free trade has when it confronts the
legions of folk economists out on the street is that it is silent on
how those gains-from-trade are divided. Envy and suspicion are almost
always included in the driving factors that lead to each breakdown of
free trade.

Any number of paradoxes and anomalies familiar to economics teachers
point to the importance of the perception of fair division of
gains-from-trade (for example, most people would prefer to be rich in a
poor country, rather than poor in a rich country, even if they were
richer in absolute terms in the second case). Again this sounds a lot
like sex: would you rather have a lot of sex with a partner perceived
as undesirable by others, or less sex with someone perceived as
desirable by others? Just as with money, I think a lot of people would
choose the latter.

Our own single economist in London, Mr S&M, takes the argument a stage further, pointing out that he knows a lot about not having sex…which given his location and belief that London women are ugly makes some sort of sense.

So we have two economics professors, a philosopher with economic interests and an economist/journalist pointing out to us why people are not in fact having as much sex as one might suppose they would or should.

And this is, of course, the difference between rock stars and economists. Rock stars are different from everyone else because they do indeed get offered more sex than they can handle, something that us mere mortals don’t. But it is only the economists who actually know why, alone amongst the frustrated masses, they aren’t getting enough. One might take comfort in this ability of the science to shed a little light into one of the dark corners of the human experience or one might prefer my view:

Dismal, I call it.