Formulated this way, it becomes clear that substitution phenomena occur in love. People who are not perfect homosexuals or heterosexuals on the Kinsey scale will substitute for their more preferred alternatives it the cost of the latter is too high. If the gorgeous citizen's daughter next door is not approachable, the classical 30-year-old male Greek will substitute the closest alternative, i.e., a teenage boy. Of course, everybody's elasticity of substitution will be different, and will be zero in some cases: not anybody will substitute a goat in the desert. On all this, see the remarkable book of Richard Posner, Sex and Reason. It is full of substitutable love objects. The demand for the most gorgious kind of woman has a negative slope.
Now, even if we can conceive of a demand curve for love in general, it probably has a negative slope too for any consumer, and certainly for the market as a whole. Other plesaures are substitutable for love: it depends on the price. Monks are only one instance of this.
P.L.
At 20:12 00-09-28, you wrote:
In a recent discussion I had (off-line), someone described the demand for heroin (by heroin addicts) as perfectly inelastic. I responded that that was a bit off; if demand for heroin were perfectly inelastic, I would charge $1 billion a hit, and inevitably find a buyer. I offered, as a possible alternative for a good with perfectly inelastic demand, love.
Then I thought - is the demand for love *perfectly inelastic* (meaning, people desire one quantity, but at any price), or *perfectly elastic* (meaning, people desire any quantity, but demand will be infinite below a given price), or something else entirely?
Any ideas?
Visiting Professor , Université du Québec à Hull
Director of the Groupe de Recherche Économie et Liberté (GREL)
Research Fellow, Independent Institute
http://www.pierrelemieux.org
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"L'homme vivant sous la servitude des lois prend
sans s'en douter une âme d'esclave."
The man who lives under the servitude of laws takes,
without suspecting it, the soul of a slave.
(Georges Ripert, Le Déclin du Droit, Paris, Librairie
Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1949, p. 94)
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