I am not sure one can talk of the demand for
love more than about a demand for happiness. As
Rothbard said, people make choices at the margin, they demand a certain
type of love relationship in a certain period of time.
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?
PIERRE LEMIEUX
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
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Backup: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
Montréal address:
C.P. 725, Tour de la Bourse, Montréal, Canada H4Z 1J9
Fax: 1(819)585-4423
PGP Key: 0xBDFFCD16
Fingerprint: CF3E 4A3F 57AB 8AB2 88FB A1D8 C83D 2E15 BDFF
CD16
**
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)
**
