In honor of Mark Sanford and that other guy from Nevada, the fun-loving crowd over at Planet Money has been talking about the economics of adultery, and even got Simon to comment for them. I’m all in favor of a cute model, but I think this is as much a sign of the over-expansion of economic reason as anything else.
Chana Joffe-Walt’s post asks this question of the typical cheating politician: “Didn’t he know he’ll get caught, put his family through hell, exhaust all of us with the details and jeopardize his career? The costs are so great, how could the affair possibly be worth it?”
Well, that assumes that he was going to get caught, and the odds of being caught in an affair are one of those things that are inherently very difficult to measure (and that cheaters are likely to underestimate, because of selection bias). We can see the numerator, but we can’t see the denominator. It also assumes that trading your political career for a steamy affair is a bad outcome. On some level, don’t you suspect that a lot of male politicians do it because they want to impress women, and that affairs are part of the payoff of politics? And what sane person would really want to be in electoral politics anyway?
More generally, the motivations that drive people to want to have sex with people they are not married to, or otherwise live secret lives other than the one they are supposed to live, seem to me not only too complex for a Chicago-school rational-actor model, but even perhaps too complex for a behavioral model. That is, I suspect that this type of behavior involves multiple actors inside the same person: one person who combines the ambitious, values-touting politician; the typical middle-aged man going through a midlife crisis and hoping for someone to validate his self-image; and, of course, the lout who thinks with something other than his brain. I think combining those sides of the psyche into a single utility model and maximizing it subject to a budget constraint (be it money or time) is basically a fantasy. But economists these days wil stop at nothing.
By James Kwak
The Baseline Scenario 
James,
You inadvertently point out the limitations of modern economics, which is premised upon the mistaken conviction that all “economic” decisions are based solely on considerations of wealth. That’s a fiction that has been fostered by the Austrian and Chicago Schools of economics in order to kill the “communistic fiction” of the “invisible hand” metaphor, but it is a fiction.
My view of Sanford is that he hates his marriage to the Skil heiress, and he wants to get as far away from her as possible believing that he can lead a good and righteous life without her. I don’t think there is anything “irrational” about it because happiness is more than just being famous and rich. The guy has enough clout and skill to be comfortable, particularly in a third world latin country. So, he continues to make embarassing revelations, but embarassing to whom? Not him. He does not care. All of his revelations are aimed right at her.
Power dynamics are interesting, James. You know that, or should.
I think Mr. Kwak makes a good point in that we have pretty much gone past the limits of what economics models can do or predict. I think even the people at Planet Money knew that before they did the piece, but adultery/sex stories are a good way to attract/keep listeners. It’s not a legitimate news story and NPR knows that. It’s a way to push people’s buttons.
As far as Sanford is concerned, I think it’s been a marriage of convenience for YEARS. She provides him with campaign finances, and he gives her access to the system and the elite people of Charlotte. They both get what they bargained for. My guess is, similar to Bill and Hillary Clinton they’ve agreed a long time ago that as long as he doesn’t embarrass her PUBLICLY he can play all he wants. And really did you see Mrs. Sanford on TV??? My guess is her fun box is a few degrees more frigid than Hillary’s. And if we think of 2004 other politicians with a nice smile and a spouse from a wealthy family might come to mind……
It gets down to the fact that sex is a strong strong physical desire for men (women I don’t pretend to understand). If that desire is unquenched things will happen. You can’t make a model for foxes telling them how risky it is to steal eggs from the hen house.
I was thinking about this just this morning. I like to think of it as the “Freakonomics effect.”
“The profession of politics would be altogether too disagreeable without compensation above and beyond what is strictly appropriate.”
Human behavior is so filled with irrationality that it’s amazing to me that we call ourselves the rational animal. Take “housing prices will always go up” as a start.
There are substantial benefits to writing a blog post that simultaneously disses economics and discusses the salacious topic of adultery. An increase in readership, fame, notoriety, etc.
Of course, there are also costs. The author might need an economist some day, who will be hacked off if the particular blog post is remembered.
Let epsilon denote a decay factor for blog post memory,
gamma sub t is the (time varying) probability that a post will be remembered (gamma may be a function of more than time and epsilon)
…
“On some level, don’t you suspect that a lot of male politicians do it because they want to impress women, and that affairs are part of the payoff of politics?”
Affairs, baseball tickets, free renovations on the house, steak dinners, golf games, drugs… Every time a scandal breaks, I get more depressed – not because the politicians are human (I don’t expect better) but because the scale of bribes is so petty. I want a better class of crook!
“The author might need an economist some day,”
What services would an economist provide for an individual? I’m trying to come up with a plausible scenario, and blanking…