Feb 14 JDN 2458529

Valentine’s Day was this past week, so let’s talk a bit about love.

Economists would never be accused of being excessively romantic. To most neoclassical economists, just about everything is a market transaction. Love is no exception.

There are all sorts of articles and books and an even larger number of research papers going back multiple decades and continuing all the way through until today using the metaphor of the “marriage market”.

In a few places, marriage does actually function something like a market: In China, there are places where your parents will hire brokers and matchmakers to select a spouse for you. But even this isn’t really a market for love or marriage. It’s a market for matchmaking services. The high-tech version of this is dating sites like OkCupid.
And of course sex work actually occurs on markets; there is buying and selling of services at monetary prices. There is of course a great deal worth saying on that subject, but it’s not my topic for today.

But in general, love is really nothing like a market. First of all, there is no price. This alone should be sufficient reason to say that we’re not actually dealing with a market. The whole mechanism that makes a market a market is the use of prices to achieve equilibrium between supply and demand.

A price doesn’t necessarily have to be monetary; you can barter apples for bananas, or trade in one used video game for another, and we can still legitimately call that a market transaction with a price.

But love isn’t like that either. If your relationship with someone is so transactional that you’re actually keeping a ledger of each thing they do for you and each thing you do for them so that you could compute a price for services, that isn’t love. It’s not even friendship. If you really care about someone, you set such calculations aside. You view their interests and yours as in some sense shared, aligned toward common goals. You stop thinking in terms of “me” and “you” and start thinking in terms of “us”. You don’t think “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.” You think “We’re scratching each other’s backs today.”

This is of course not to say that love never involves conflict. On the contrary, love always involves conflict. Successful relationships aren’t those where conflict never happens, they are those where conflict is effectively and responsibly resolved. Your interests and your loved ones’ are never completely aligned; there will always be some residual disagreement. But the key is to realize that your interests are still mostly aligned; those small vectors of disagreement should be outweighed by the much larger vector of your relationship.

And of course, there can come a time when that is no longer the case. Obviously, there is domestic abuse, which should absolutely be a deal-breaker for anyone. But there are other reasons why you may find that a relationship ultimately isn’t working, that your interests just aren’t as aligned as you thought they were. Eventually those disagreement vectors just get too large to cancel out. This is painful, but unavoidable. But if you reach the point where you are keeping track of actions on a ledger, that relationship is already dead. Sooner or later, someone is going to have to pull the plug.

Very little of what I’ve said in the preceding paragraphs is likely to be controversial. Why, then, would economists think that it makes sense to treat love as a market?

I think this comes down to a motte and bailey doctrine. A more detailed explanation can be found at that link, but the basic idea of a motte and bailey is this: You have a core set of propositions that is highly defensible but not that interesting (the “motte”), and a broader set of propositions that are very interesting, but not as defensible (the “bailey”). The terms are related to a medieval defensive strategy, in which there was a small, heavily fortified tower called a motte, surrounded by fertile, useful land, the bailey. The bailey is where you actually want to live, but it’s hard to defend; so if the need arises, you can pull everyone back into the motte to fight off attacks. But nobody wants to live in the motte; it’s just a cramped stone tower. There’s nothing to eat or enjoy there.

The motte comprised of ideas that almost everyone agrees with. The bailey is the real point of contention, the thing you are trying to argue for—which, by construction, other people must not already agree with.

Here are some examples, which I have intentionally chosen from groups I agree with:

Feminism can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “women are people”; the bailey is abortion rights, affirmative consent and equal pay legislation.

Rationalism can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “rationality is good”; the bailey is atheism, transhumanism, and Bayesian statistics.

Anti-fascism can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “fascists are bad”; the bailey is black bloc Antifa and punching Nazis.

Even democracy can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “people should vote for their leaders”; my personal bailey is abolition of the Electoral College, a younger voting age, and range voting.

Using a motte and bailey doctrine does not necessarily make you wrong. But it’s something to be careful about, because as a strategy it can be disingenuous. Even if you think that the propositions in the bailey all follow logically from the propositions in the motte, the people you’re talking to may not think so, and in fact you could simply be wrong. At the very least, you should be taking the time to explain how one follows from the other; and really, you should consider whether the connection is actually as tight as you thought, or if perhaps one can believe that rationality is good without being Bayesian or believe that women are people without supporting abortion rights.

I think when economists describe love or marriage as a “market”, they are applying a motte and bailey doctrine. They may actually be doing something even worse than that, by equivocating on the meaning of “market”. But even if any given economist uses the word “market” totally consistently, the fact that different economists of the same broad political alignment use the word differently adds up to a motte and bailey doctrine.

The doctrine is this: “There have always been markets.”

The motte is something like this: “Humans have always engaged in interaction for mutual benefit.”

This is undeniably true. In fact, it’s not even uninteresting. As mottes go, it’s a pretty nice one; it’s worth spending some time there. In the endless quest for an elusive “human nature”, I think you could do worse than to focus on our universal tendency to engage in interaction for mutual benefit. (Don’t other species do it too? Yes, but that’s just it—they are precisely the ones that seem most human.)

And if you want to define any mutually-beneficial interaction as a “market trade”, I guess it’s your right to do that. I think this is foolish and confusing, but legislating language has always been a fool’s errand.

But of course the more standard meaning of the word “market” implies buyers and sellers exchanging goods and services for monetary prices. You can extend it a little to include bartering, various forms of financial intermediation, and the like; but basically you’re still buying and selling.

That makes this the bailey: “Humans have always engaged in buying and selling of goods and services at prices.”

And that, dear readers, is ahistorical nonsense. We’ve only been using money for a few thousand years, and it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that we actually started getting the majority of our goods and services via market trades. Economists like to tell a story where bartering preceded the invention of money, but there’s basically no evidence of that. Bartering seems to be what people do when they know how money works but don’t have any money to work with.

Before there was money, there were fundamentally different modes of interaction: Sharing, ritual, debts of honor, common property, and, yes, love.

These were not markets. They perhaps shared some very broad features of markets—such as the interaction for mutual benefit—but they lacked the defining attributes that make a market a market.

Why is this important? Because this doctrine is used to transform more and more of our lives into actual markets, on the grounds that they were already “markets”, and we’re just using “more efficient” kinds of markets. But in fact what’s happening is we are trading one fundamental mode of human interaction for another: Where we used to rely upon norms or trust or mutual affection, we instead rely upon buying and selling at prices.

In some cases, this actually is a good thing: Markets can be very powerful, and are often our best tool when we really need something done. In particular, it’s clear at this point that norms and trust are not sufficient to protect us against climate change. All the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” PSAs in the world won’t do as much as a carbon tax. When millions of lives are at stake, we can’t trust people to do the right thing; we need to twist their arms however we can.

But markets are in some sense a brute-force last-resort solution; they commodify and alienate (Marx wasn’t wrong about that), and despite our greatly elevated standard of living, the alienation and competitive pressure of markets seem to be keeping most of us from really achieving happiness.

This is why it’s extremely dangerous to talk about a “market for love”. Love is perhaps the last bastion of our lives that has not been commodified into a true market, and if it goes, we’ll have nothing left. If sexual relationships built on mutual affection were to disappear in favor of apps that will summon a prostitute or a sex robot at the push of a button, I would count that as a great loss for human civilization. (How we should regulate prostitution or sex robots are a different question, which I said I’d leave aside for this post.) A “market for love” is in fact a world with no love at all.