More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics by Steven E. Landsburg Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics
Book Review: Entertaining but Inconclusive
Summary: 4 Stars
'More Sex Is Safer Sex' is packed with inconclusive economic analysis that seem to shock readers, rather than enlighten them with coherent insight. While I feel neutral with Landsburg's cost/beneift analysis & conclusions, I find his witty writing style entertaining. I enjoy the book more than Levitt's 'Freakonomics', & a key success of it is that Landsburg has shown how economic reasoning can provide unconventional solutions/perspectives to problems.Book Review: If you liked Freakonomics...
Summary: 4 Stars
If Freakonomics has you looking for similar material, this is your book. It is less accessible, more hardcore, and somehow a purer form of the often disturbing but ineluctable logic that characterizes this vein of unconventional economic thinking. If Freakonomics is Playboy, then this is Hustler (sorry, probably a bad analogy given the title).
While it is certainly engaging and thought-provoking in the same manner as its more popular cousin, it will often make the reader uncomfortable with its cold, calculating logic. This is perhaps Mr. Landsburg's intention- there is clearly little room in his rubric for illogical emotion- but it will often occur to the reader that the best economists are students of human nature as much as mathematics, and that sometimes the way human beings choose to use resources are indeed illogical. He has no problem at all quantifying the value of a human life, and his lack of squeamishness in dealing with such subjects is to be applauded- but it still often seems that Mr. Landsburg's analyses could benefit from a bit more input from the fields of anthropology or psychology.
On the other hand, most of the ways we have been taught to think about the difficult problems he treats are so fraught with illogical and emotional positions that his analyses are refreshing, if not sometimes a bit shocking.
Read it- you will certainly enjoy it.
Book Review: Bogusnomics ...
Summary: 1 Stars
Reading this book is a clearly useful exercise: recognizing incorrect arguments is a useful (and sometimes very fun) skill!
The "unconventional wisdom" from this book is actually a collection of comically oversimplified, misleading, inconsistent, and unverified "theories" (yes, all quotes are intended).
Oversimplification: chapter 6 has six pages plus five additional lines. Its title? Very modest: "How to fix Politics"! Initially, I thought Landsburg is joking, but, no, in the next chapter, the equally modest "How to Fix the Justice System" (22 pages), Landsburg reassures us: "Am I serious? Of course I'm serious!"
Misleading: let's look at the chapter that gives the title of the entire book. As the example goes, Martin and Joan (who like each other very much) plan to leave together from the company Christmas party. But Martin gets scared by an AIDS-awareness ad and decides to skip the party. Joan finds herself alone at the party and leaves with Maxwell, who's HIV-positive. So, if Martin decided to have more sex, Joan would be safer today! Landsburg, a professor of economics at Univ. of Rochester, generalizes this into "More Sex is Safer Sex"! Before you start celebrating, please read on. What he's actually proving is the less interesting statement "if the total quantity of sex (defined as different couples) were equal, then a more uniform distribution of sex maximizes safety". For people who like graph theory, "in a graph with a constant number of nodes and edges, the diameter is likely to be bigger if the node degrees are equal". Notice that this is a quite boring result, clearly not one to generate big sales :) It is also a useless result, as it uses the baseless assumption of a constant quantity of sex (after all, Joan could have gone home alone). There are many instances of this "zero-sum fallacy" in the book.
The Landsburg-style "thinking" culminates in Chapter 14, section "The Sack of Baghdad". There, Landsburg tries to convince us that the sack of the National Museum of Iraq was not such a big deal after all: "A lot of stuff in that museum was five thousand years old. If it were in my garage, I'd have swept it out to the curb a long time ago." Really? I bet he would have sold that "stuff" for a hefty profit. The value of "stuff" is not given by its protein content, nor by what Prof. Landsburg thinks, but by the market (it's shocking that a professor of economics forgets this!). And in the case of the "stuff" from the Baghdad Museum, many buyers were ready to pay a lot of money for it, the same way many people would pay a lot of money for Mona Lisa, another example of old "stuff". Besides, the looting of Baghdad sent a powerful message: the law has collapsed and brutal force rules. No wonder criminals have ruled the streets of Baghdad ever since ...
Book Review: Read this if you enjoy a condescending tone!
Summary: 2 Stars
I generally enjoy books of this type (such as Freakonomics), but this one was disappointing. The author seemed to be trying to find examples to write about in which economics defies common sense/conventional wisdom. Instead, he all too frequently uses economics to justify his opinions about how the world should be.
The best chapters are those such as the one that the title of the book is from, in which he argues using statistics and ideas from economics such as cost benefit analysis, while refraining from too much pontificating. Unfortunately, there is a whole portion of the book (called "How to Fix Everything") in which economics seems to be only the catalyst that allows the author too express his views. He frequently sites arguments from those who disagree with him (he has a Slate column and a website), and his rebuttals have a nasty tone. At one point he even tells the reader "If you think... ...then grow up!" Skip this one if you want to be treated by the author as an intelligent reader.
Book Review: More sensationalism is bigger sales
Summary: 1 Stars
Exhibit A: The title of the book. You could think it refers to some surprising research that indicates that people who have more sex actually contract fewer diseases. Or maybe it refers to the whole societies that, when they are more open and free about sex, are safer than closed and repressed ones? No, and no, and you can stop guessing, because you never will. It refers to a certain complicated (and, in all likelihood, wrong) model of spread of HIV under which a small, sexually inactive group of people can make things slightly safer for OTHERS (while making it LESS safe for themselves) by having more sex. You might say: well, this is neither particularly surprising, nor very interesting. Since even under this model absolutely everybody will stay healthier if s/he has less sex, it has no practical value, nor does it really mean "More Sex is Safer Sex." True, but, you see, the book SELLS well with that title which is the whole point.
Exhibit B. A wonderful theory that it would be much better if at your local bank every new person that walks in would go to the front of the line, instead of the back (I am not kidding). You see, Landsburg believes that the people at the back of the line will quickly get frustrated and leave (which will result in short, efficient lines and happy customers - ha!). Well, maybe that's what Landsburg, or a retarded monkey, does: simply leave after realizing they are stuck at the end of the line. Anybody with half a brain will leave -- and immediately come back, to the front of the line. Of course that would destroy a beautiful model, just like people not wanting to get HIV simply so (maybe) other people do not, destroy the first one.
Freakonomics, for all its faults, was a result of years of research of a rather prominent, if controversial, economist, out of which the authors picked the most interesting topics for laymen to see. Landsburg did not have time to do research: he needed to put the manuscript out while popular economics is hot. So he stuffed the book with every half-baked kooky idea he could come up with. Because while he might lack the "conventional" wisdom, he understands the marketplace well enough.