Sexonomics 101 Lecture 1

A friend lent me a copy of Deficits and Desires: Economics and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature, by Michael Trainer (Stanford U. Press, 2001) with instructions to offer a critique from an economist's perspective. How could I resist? The parallels between deficit spending and sexual indulgence are too obvious to be missed (yet they have been missed so long; one scans the pages of the American Economic Review in vain for even one reference). So here's my first installment.

Introduction. Trainer examines parallels between economic developments (esp. Keynesian theory) and changes in sexual theories from the 1920s to roughly the 1960s. "I wish to show that we can trace a change in the way arguments about the effects of economic policies and individual economic acts are stated. Certain tropes, themes, and models are in a sense accepted by all sides, and shape the disagreements... The discourses, metaphors, images, and behaviors developed in one realm find support or are hindered by discourses, metaphors, images, and behaviors in other realms... "mutual representability": the terms in one discourse turn out to be useful to represent elements in another... Keynesian policies and theories of deficit spending combined with an explosion of consumer credit in the 1920s and 1930s to radically alter personal and public economic morality: people at all levels of income were encouraged to spend money, to indulge their desires... My research may... add to our understanding of the present: the contradictions of the mid-twentieth century "Keynesian" era survive, if only in the ways that the present is defined as a move away from that earlier period. Thus, the present can seem a return to the "classical, liberal" era of individual responsibility, rationality, and local control by emphasizing the move toward conservatism in economics and sexuality, but it can also seem a move away from Keynesian governmental centrality into postmodern multiplicity and hybridity [he's talkin' about gays here]... the logic of deficit economics relies on national structures to provide a system in which individuals can in effect break themselves up (or give themselves away) through spending, borrowing, and participating in multiple relationships -- and yet not fall apart."

All right, it's a tough row to hoe here. You're running up against the inherent antilibidinal character of economics; it's not for nothing that economics is considered "the saltpeter of the social sciences" [I just made that up; you can use it]. But one can't help but be titilated at some parallels that the author points to. "In Victorian novels, sex and debt are described as dangerous activities that one should avoid when young in order to "save up" so that one can eventually "invest" properly, in a marriage and in a house. In twentieth century texts, in contrast, it often seems quite normal to go into debt and engage in sex before marriage; not that these do not have some dangers attached, but braving those dangers seems a useful or necessary part of growing up." Some of the language economists use can be double entendred: demand=desire, stimulus policies to pull an economy out of a recession. But these are superficial links. Can he really make the case that developments in economics and sexual morality went, er, hand in glove in the mid twentieth century?

The beginning of the story is Keynes, whom he gets about half right. I'll buy the link between Keynes' homosexuality (pre-1925), the Bloomsbury ethos, and Keynesian economics. "According to Skidelsky, Lytton Strachey's justification of homosexuality as an activity 'having no purpose outside of itself (unlike heterosexuality, whose biological purpose is procreation)... was the most radical of assaults on the Victorian principle of living, particularly its motove for saving or accumulation.' Strachey's arguments joined together with G.E. Moore's philosophy and Virginia Woolf's aesthetics, all contributing to the general Bloomsbury belief in the value of immediate experience that provided the 'psychological foundation' for Keynes' economics. Skidelsky concludes that '[it] was [Keynes'] commitment to the present which underlay his hostility to saving and thus helped him identify 'over-saving' as the cause of the Depression."

But I think Trainer misrepresents Keynes' views toward consumption and its relationship to his personal life. True, Keynes had rather liberal views toward sexuality (his list of sexual conquests reprinted in the Moggridge biography makes for interesting reading, for example). But in terms of material pleasures, Keynes was above all interested in an aesthetic lifestyle, not an oppulent one. And the types of macroeconomic policies he promoted should be considered more pro-investment than pro-consumption. Keynes is often characterized as advocating the use of deficits to promote mass consumption, but in fact his specific government spending proposals tended to focus on satisfying basic needs or public investment. From the General Theory: "If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines whihc are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise... to dig the notes up again... there need be no more unemployment... It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing." Keynes' attitude toward consumption, which he equated with the money-loving instinct, is shown in his essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren". In that essay he discusses what will happen to society when mankind has solved the economic problem (producing enough to provide a basic standard of living for the entire population. "Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure... to live wisely and agreeably and well.... [I]t will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes... We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter - to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen hour week may put off the problem for a great while... The love of money as a possession... will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease."

All right, so there's the big hurdle so far. Keynes is commonly thought of as pro-consumption (pro-sex), but I think of him as pro-investment, which I can't quite work into the Victorian versus free love continuum. But maybe 20th century literature will sort this out. I'm at a disadvantage in working through the rest of this book since I haven't read Ulysses or Virginia Woolf or some of the other works. On the other hand, I think I remember parts of the Great Gatsby and I've memorized every line of It's A Wonderful Life, so maybe I'll have something intelligent to say. Stay tuned.