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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 330
EAN num: 9781416532217
ISBN number: 1416532218
Label: Free Press
Manufacturer: Free Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: April 17, 2007
Publishing house: Free Press
Sale Popularity Level: 123238
Studio: Free Press
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Steven Landsburg's writings are living proof that economics need not be 'the dismal science.' Readers of The Armchair Economist and his columns in Slate magazine know that he can make economics not only fun but fascinating, as he searches for the reasons behind the odd facts we face in our daily lives. In More Sex Is Safer Sex, he brings his witty and razor-sharp analysis to the many ways that our individually rational decisions can combine into some truly weird collective results -- and he proposes hilarious and serious ways to fix just about everything.
When you stand up at the ballpark in order to see better, you make a rational decision. When everyone else does it too, the results, of course, are lousy. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of individual sanity and collective madness. Did you know that some people may actually increase the spread of sexually transmitted diseases when they avoid casual sex? Do you know why tall people earn more money than shorter competitors? (Hint: it isn't just unfair, unconscious prejudice.) Do you know why it makes no sense for you to give charitable donations to more than one organization?
Landsburg's solutions to the many ways that modern life is unfair or inefficient are both jaw-dropping and maddeningly defensible. We should encourage people to cut in line at water fountains on hot days. We should let firefighters keep any property they rescue from burning houses. We should encourage more people to act like Scrooge, because misers are just as generous as philanthropists.
Best of all are Landsburg's commonsense solutions to the political problems that plague our democracy. We should charge penalties to jurors if they convict a felon who is later exonerated. We should let everyone vote in two congressional districts: their own, and any other one of their choice. While we're at it, we should redraw the districts according to the alphabetical lists of all voters, rather than by geography. We should pay FDA commissioners with shares of pharmaceutical company stocks, and pay our president with a diversified portfolio of real estate from across the country.
Why do parents of sons stay married more often than parents who have only daughters? Why does early motherhood not only correlate with lower income, but actually cause it? Why do we execute murderers but not the authors of vicious computer viruses? The lesson of this fascinating, fun, and endlessly provocative book is twofold: many apparently very odd behaviors have logical explanations, and many apparently logical behaviors make no sense whatsoever.
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Rated by buyers 
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A long, long time in a far, far away galaxy John Stuart Mills' parents sent the young boy to live and learn from the political philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, who fed the boy nothing but utilitarianism until at age twenty-one John Stuart Mills had a nervous breakdown. Reading "More Safe is Safer Sex" we need imagine that Steven Landsburg was born in the University of Chicago economics department, where he was nursed, parented, and fed by economic textbooks: there really is no other explanation on how he could have written "More Safe is Safer Sex," which is economics on steroids.
Take for example the very first chapter and title argument: "More Safe is Safer Sex." Mr. Landsburg creates a thought experiment: shy and reserved Martin parties with co-worker Joan, and they're about to go to bed but Martin is reluctant, and Joan ends up going home with promiscuous Maxwell, who gives her AIDS. Mr. Landsburg reasons that it's Martin's fault that Joan got AIDS, and then reasons that it really wasn't Martin's fault because there wasn't enough of an economic incentive for him to have sex with Joan. So Mr. Landsburg's solution: free condoms. Yes, the economic allure of free condoms is enough to transform the shyest geek into the most daring Casanova.
Mr. Landsburg is trying to make a "communal stream" argument, that if more clean individuals like Martin were willing to have sex then they would help purify the common stream against dirty individuals like Maxwell, and the spread of AIDS could be halted. The problem with economics is that it treats humans as a mathematical algorithm, and, as I said earlier, this book is economics on steroids. Mr. Landsburg, let me tell you right now that, if he is a flesh and blood male, Martin wants to get laid, and if Joan offers herself Martin would be more than happy to jump into bed with her. But if Joan offers herself to Martin why wouldn't she offer herself to Maxwell? And then sleep with either of them as she likes? So instead of just Joan getting AIDS from Maxwell so would Martin. This is just simple human psychology (humans have personalities, and their personalities dictate their actions) combined with a little game theory (Joan having sex with Martin does not preclude her with having sex with Maxwell). Most people would call this conclusion "common sense."
Alas, psychology, game theory, "common sense," and just about everything else are what this book painfully lack, although University of Chicago economics majors would be happy to know that there's plenty of classical cost-benefit economics.
Rated by buyers 
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'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 sucess of it is that Landsburg has shown how economic reasoning can provide unconventional solutions/perspectives to problems.
Rated by buyers -
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.
Rated by buyers -
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 subsequent 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 ...
Rated by buyers 
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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.
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