Ken Gordon wrote: >Samuel Bostaph wrote: >> The implicit cost of such relations is, >>of course, what a man would have to pay a prostitute for those same >>services. > > >The GDP, of course, measures value added. Sex, at least in the form >discussed here, involves two people each of whom has an imputed >input cost paid to the other. The value added by the transaction is >zero. > To be serious for a minute, and not just be subject to eye-rolling: isn't this precisely where economics as a serious science displays that it fails -- because, if you want to measure true GDP and need to deal with imputed costs, you as an economist don't know whether to use the prostitute model, the reciprocal model, or the giglio model to impute the costs -- and you can't, unless you study the norms and customs and behaviors of society or, perhaps, of all the individuals in the society. And the problem with sex is only the example that makes obvious that other economists' uses of indirect indicators or theoretical assumptions simply has no assurance of accuracy. (The sex discussion goes back to Becker's sexism, or non-sexism, or arbitrary assumptions, as was discussed on this list a while ago.) (And, as I said in an earlier post, this is a non-economist speaking -- a non-economist who is a political theorist and so inevitably interested in economic issues.) Peter G. Stillman