Erotonomics 101: Macroeconomic Principles

In my last post, I covered the micro side of Mankiw’s ten principles of economics. Now we’ll explore the macro ones, as they would apply in erotonomics. Which is, tangentially, a great word.

So, these three remain:

1. A country’s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services. When dealing in sexwork, one can extrapolate some pretty interesting things about this principle from countries where the sex trade is a tourist resource or a means by which sexual labor is factored into the GDP as immigrant sexworkers earn grey and blackmarket money working in other countries and ship it home to be spent. One might do an entire blog on that specific aspect of erotonomics, tying it into trafficking, as well.

2. Inflation is the government printing too much money. While I disagree that this is inflation, inflation itself does some very perverse things to the supply side of sexwork in terms of dangerous and profit-slicing incentives.

And lastly,
3. Societies face a short-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. What this means specific to sexual labor and the sexual economy is, in fact, the inverse. Sexual labor bears some relation to household production (presently unfactored into national GDPs) in that during times of unemployment, there is a larger supply of labor and a higher (albeit pretty elastic) demand for the services. Inflation (presuming it improves national employment, which I don’t actually agree with but will let slide for now) is not a net benefit to this industry.

I am clumsy in my extrapolations of this stuff, but when I’m speaking in terms of the most general economic principles, these are the directions I am coming from.

And that concludes intro material.