Economics of Love: AIDS Gospel According to Economics [Part II]
Various statistics has shown that AIDS is now an epidemic especially in most developing countries especially in African countries*
As scary as AIDS or this statistics seem, in a countries like USA or some other countries, there is still a low percentage of people infected with AIDS comparable to healthy people (all things equal) and upon this fact, I will draw a solution on combating the spreading of this deadly virus.
On discussing with some friends I mentioned: “Don’t you think encouraging people to have more sex can actually curb the spread of the Virus?” No matter how I try to prove my logic, almost everyone I have proposed this solution to finds it very ridiculous. A disease that is primary spread through sex: “how is having more sex going to curb its spread? You must be such an insane joker to even think of such a thing.”
Let dive straight into this argument:
Once again, let’s take the hypothetical market of reLove where all things are equal and (comparably similar to the real world where the figures of those living with the virus is significantly lower§) we have 96% perfectly healthy people and 4% infected with the HIV/AIDS Virus - we will be working with this data for working on my economic cure for this disease.
Let suppose, we have a guy in reLove named Jim who has tested positive for the virus and another guy Jack a perfectly health male. With the situation of things now, while the marginal cost of Jim having more HIV is almost zero, this alone can serve as an incentive for Jim to have more sex.
In what sense will Jim’s HIV incent him to have more sex? For Jack, he has the fear of contracting the virus hence he chooses the safest escape - abstinence from having sex, this simultaneously increase the chances of Jim having sex with more partners and spreading the virus to uniformed partners.
The Jacks in reLove (perfectly healthy) each on their own would not know they are disrupting the market and indirectly promoting the transmission of this virus for just the fear that another perfectly healthy female, let’s call her Jill would supposedly have a virus then transmit it to him and this false hopes drives a rather healthy female who would have otherwise had sex with Jack to have sex with Jim thereby getting the virus and so forth.
Since this may read confusing, let me just put it this way: For every less sex that the 95% of the Jacks and Jills don’t have, they almost double the chances of the Jims and Janes (HIV/AIDS infected) of spreading the disease - the 80/20 rule works here too.
Since the obvious solution might be to encourage the Jacks and Janes to have more sex (though this has obvious flaws which I would highlight in the next article), maybe even go even more wild with this idea and offer to pay every healthy person for every additional sex had with another healthy person. Yes, this sounds absolutely ridiculous as my friends have often pointed out but then, I have decided to think outside of the conventional box.
As fun as the idea of encouraging more sex to cure HIV, I have even being faced with greater bugs (as computer programmers would prefer to call it) in my logic of thought which I intend to tackle in the next part of this post. If you’re enjoying this radical thought so far, stay tuned for more coming.
* http://www.avert.org/worlstatinfo.htm
§ http://www.globalhealthreporting.org/diseaseinfo.asp?id=23
July 18th, 2008 at 10:43 am
well, i think you are trying to make impact to the entire world and most especially to the African world! I am very proud of you almost to my bones and pint of my Blood.
what a fantastic write ups you are putting up on your site. All what a Black man can do is to do like a “White Nigger man”….lol.
I expect more of you in that White man’s land.
your Big brother.