Psychotherapist Orion Taraban, host of the enormously popular PyschHacks YouTube channel, has a new book out. In The Value of Others: Understanding the Economic Model of Relationships to Get (and Keep) More of What You Want in the Sexual Marketplace, he attempts to explain dating and romantic relationships through the lens of economics. It’s an interesting idea, especially to someone like me who’s written about economics for many years. But on balance, it leads to a pretty broken worldview.
Why?
First off, Taraban’s transactional model leads to a dim view of human nature. A big place that this shows up is how Taraban talks about mutinies.
Taraban’s model of relationships is a naval one: a captain and a passenger (or passengers, as the case may be) contract to sail the ocean blue together. Eventually, Taraban warns, the passenger may be tempted to mutiny: that is, to try to seize control of the ship so that the ship goes where the passenger wants to go, rather than to the original and mutually agreed-upon destination. Examples of mutinies include “When passengers suddenly confess that having children is actually very important to them and that they need a captain willing to start a family immediately” and “when passengers become sulky or throw a tantrum every time captains go out with their friends.” Taraban suggests that captains should shut down any mutiny immediately, with a 30-second conversation that gets the following point across: “if you ever try something like that again, I’ll cast you adrift in a rowboat.”
Given the destructive nature of a mutiny (to say nothing of the captain’s response), one would expect mutinies to be pretty rare. Not in Taraban’s world. He warns that “few passengers can entirely resist the urge to mutiny over a long enough timeline.” Why? Because “most people make decisions based on an (often unconscious) analysis of the various incentives under which they are operating, as opposed to recourse to a personally extrapolated moral or ethical code.”
When Taraban describes human relationships, he seems to have in mind relationships between two homo economicus (a term for imaginary humans whose only goal is to maximize their economic success, untempered by any higher virtues or ethics). The average homo economicus passenger might indeed rebel in the way that Taraban described, and the average homo economicus captain may indeed respond as Taraban suggests. But in the real world, with real people, this situation is a lot less frequent.
The same dim worldview can be seen in Taraban’s perspective on cheating. He suggests that, when we are in the sexual marketplace and we don’t wish to attract a sexual encounter, “The best we can do is communicate on as many levels as possible that we are ‘closed for business.’”
“Just keep in mind,” he warns, “that most shops are willing to transact after hours for the right price.” Or to put it another way: most people would cheat if the right opportunity came along. But I’m not sure this is true. The Institute for Family Studies reports that just 20 percent of men (and 13 percent of women) have had sex with someone other than their spouse while married. Or to put it another way: 80-87 percent of married people are loyal. Some probably haven’t cheated because the right opportunity hasn’t come along, but others stay faithful because real people have virtues which homo economicus lack.
Taraban also describes a lot of mating strategies that, if they were applied in (for instance) the realm of business, we would call immoral. He says that women can attract a higher-quality husband by letting said man sleep around while remaining emotionally and financially committed to her. Another way that a woman can increase her success in the relationship market, he suggests, is to become so enmeshed in her man’s life that “it becomes prohibitively expensive to extricate her from his life” even if he wanted to (Taraban admits that this strategy would be “somewhat nefarious” if utilized in the realm of business).
His strategies for men aren’t much better. He says that because men need experience to be considered sexually attractive to women, one winning strategy is to seduce women that we don’t actually like, just for the experience they offer. But using people and discarding them the moment they cease providing value (especially if you don’t communicate this intention upfront to the other person) has never been an ethical way to date. Taraban says that another way for a man to gain experience is via simultaneous dating: that is, dating multiple women at the same time. That doesn’t sound so bad until you realize that his example of what simultaneous dating looks like is dating five women at once for an entire year.
To his credit, Taraban makes it clear that he’s not endorsing these strategies (though he’s not discouraging them either). But he also promises that they work. If a business consultant wrote a book essentially saying that, “I’m not endorsing corporate fraud, but it does work and here’s how to do it,” then we would hardly consider the book to be prosocial.
I’ve always thought that markets work wonderfully, but that a precondition of this wonderfulness is some level of virtue in the market participants. In a commercial marketplace, these virtues can be secondary (though it might be a better world if they were not). But when it comes to romance, these virtues are a lot more important. My marriage to my wife works because both of us practice a sort of self-emptying love; that is, we are in each other’s corners as much as we are in our own. The reason that I don’t cheat is not because the right opportunity hasn’t come along, but because cheating would violate the foundational virtues on which we built our relationship.
To be fair, Taraban isn’t blind to virtues such as love, kindness, loyalty, and friendship. He calls these “non-transactable goods” and he says that they are of the utmost importance. Probably the best part of the book is a short section epitomized by the below:
Like all other non-transactable goods, love fundamentally represents ‘another way to go.’ Without these goods, the social world would be nothing more than the marketplace of human relationships. The highest good the individual could attain would be his or her own perpetual self-gratification, which is even less fulfilling than it is possible. Nothing is wicked about transacting with others for our needs and wants, but this is hardly life’s highest possibility. Qualities like friendship and loyalty and love have the potential to redeem the suffering of life and can prevent existence from becoming unbearably hellacious. They are real, and they are invaluable. Through the cultivation of non-transactable goods, we not only escape the marketplace but also the narcissism of the ego – with its attendant isolation and despair.
The problem is that encouraging a purely economic model of relationships might well lead to a less virtuous and more transactional world than the one that Taraban describes wanting.
As one example: in the last chapter, Taraban suggests that marriage is a dying institution. What will replace it? He suggests that romantic relationships will evolve to look something like the gig economy: you’ll get your childrearing partner in one person, your sexual partner in someone else, etc. As part of this, he suggests that relationships will become a lot shorter: out with till death, in with until this relationship no longer provides adequate value for us both. As he writes, “before too long, it will likely seem outdated (or baffling) that people used to commit to a single person for their entire lives.”
This sounds like a pretty bleak future. But when you convince your audience that relationships are all about getting what’s theirs, it also becomes a lot more plausible.