More Sex Is Safer Sex

I began this book by randomly choosing a couple of chapters to browse through. The ones that I chose were concerning child labour through the ages and how it is a necessary stage in industrialisation, and how statistically, families with daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons. These chapters were genuinely thought provoking, and filled me with a great hope that More Sex Is Safer Sex would be a great read.

It turns out that by luck or chance, I picked some of the few interesting chapters in the book. As the book began, it was somewhat hit and miss, arguments that if more people had sex, there'd be fewer cases of AIDS (which I was willing to put my mind to and consider did make sense) tempered with ones that I found fascinating, such as how fat, ugly, short people earn less than tall or thin or attractive people. But as time went on, it seemed that ideas were being formulated just to provocative and different, such as firemen should be able to claim any property that they rescue, or that in order to make queues shorter, we should allow people to go to the front of the queue rather than the back. Some of these ideas seemed so outlandish that I questioned in my mind whether the author had been smoking crack.

Perhaps I just didn't get it. After all, in the preface the author states that 'This book will give you new insights about how the world works. Sometimes it might outrage you'. Seeking as it does to apply economics to every day life (such as cost-benefit or value), can one really take umbrage at theoretical musings? It would seem so, as two-thirds of my way through this tome I decided that the cost (2 hours or so) was not worth the benefit (reading another 100 or so pages of somewhat bollocks, tempered with the occasional thought-provoking idea), and as I had already met my value with the book ($4 from Barnes & Noble in a sale seemed to be worth the odd interesting chapter), I decided to stop.

Now that's how to apply economics to the real world!