I took a trip to Scotland earlier this month, and came home with buckets of great memories. But some quality in the northern rain must have also got me thinking, because besides the memories and photographs I also came home with three fragmentary essays in my journal. After struggling to connect these fragments in my jet-lagged mind, I realized that I ended up with three totally different topics. I want talk briefly, and separately, about each in turn.
The first topic is the most backwards-looking in that it relates to Love Economy, the novel I completed in November of last year and that I have been dong my best to promote. I’m just now starting to wrap up my explicit marketing push for this project, but the book is still on my mind as I begin to move in new directions. I wanted to do a bit of a “self book review” here that points to a new focus that emerged from writing the book. This is around gender, sexuality, and the many economic issues that relate to gender and sexuality. To the degree that what I have to say is also part of wrapping up my active novel marketing efforts, I trust you’ll forgive me.
I wrote my book with several intentions. One was to provide pure sexy entertainment, and hopefully tell a good story. But the use of the word economics in the title was not coincidental. I explicitly wanted the book to shed light on the question of personal optimization (utility maximizing) and its limits, both moral and practical. I’m thinking now though, after my Scotland trip, that maybe the book was more about economics in a directly topical way than I consciously intended as I wrote it; more an extension of some of the preoccupations I’ve explored on this blog.
Sitting up over a Rioja in the long northern twilight at our Airbnb in Edinburgh, and thinking in a distracted way about economics after looking at a statue of Adam Smith, I discovered this interpretation of Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments on a webpage posted by his long-ago employer, the University of Glasgow:
“Sympathy is central to the Theory of Moral Sentiments and underpins his whole approach to how we connect to others in society.
Smith argues that sympathy is derived by imagining how we might feel if we were exposed to the same circumstances as some other person. When we ‘enter into’ the feelings of others, we are connected to their suffering and resent those who caused it.”
Any serious fiction writer has probably experienced some version of this kind of “sympathy” as they enter into their characters. There’s a certain moment in writing a novel, I’ve now noticed, where the story takes on its own momentum and particular things suddenly “must” happen in terms of character interactions; particular decisions “must” be made if the characters are to grow and if the narrative is to continue to feel legible to the author as he/she/they work.
Some characters are harder than others though. One key character in my own book is an economist, who I gave the name Beth Kamińska. My economist character Beth was hard. I rewrote the book three times to do my smart, horny professor justice. I needed to see the world, as they say, through her eyes, to see her motivations and her actual constraints. I also, frankly, needed to get past being jealous of my own invention, a character I drew as holding a career very close to an ideal I’ve been unable to realize for myself.
In the end I hope and believe I’ve succeeded in making Beth a complex, sympathetic character. You’ll have to read Love Economy to find out. Coming back around to the topic of economics (drawn broadly) though, I now think Beth’s decisions feel especially important as they relate to lines between individual choice, fertility, sexuality, and the family. Let me see if I can explain why this is the case, and why the issues involved are economic ones.
First though, some background on my economics professor. From the outset of the book, we know Beth is a mom. We know she has a long-term partner, but describes marriage as “suboptimal” for a woman such as herself. She splits her time between two cities. In one city, she devotes herself to being a mother. In another city, she focuses on her elite academic career and side consulting for a hedge fund. We know the partner cares for the child while she is gone. We know by implication that Beth has a powerful internal drive for independence. We are given evidence early to show she is an engaged mom when she’s around, arguably an excellent mom in general despite her absences, given that she’s also a good provider.
We know by implication that her partner, a minor but important character, may be less than fully content with this arrangement. We know for sure that the partner has taken on another woman, a bestie of Beth’s, as a lover and co-parent of sorts when Beth is not around. We know Beth has decided to accept this situation, even though her partner initiated the open relationship in a way that was awkward at best. But Beth is hardly a victim, and has decided to maximize her “utility” and pleasure on specific terms of her own. Eventually, she makes a choice to change these rules and establishes a regular dating relationship with a younger man—a guy named James Davies (most of the novel is told from the perspective of the James character). Finally, and importantly to later themes in this essay, we know that Beth adores her daughter. She’s just turned 40, and feels a certain “baby hunger” for more children.
In short, Beth is a person who has maximized and optimized her way into an unusually rewarding but also unusually messy and painful personal life. Like I said before, this was by intention. Love Economy is designed as a meditation on the limits of optimization in the sphere of personal relationships, and the Beth character is a big part of this. While James is the story’s primary protagonist, I’ve noticed many readers (mostly women) believe Beth is the main character. This surprised me at first, but the readers may be right.
Here though as I begin to wrap up active book marketing, I’m trying to make a new case, which is that Love Economy is not just a book about dating and romance that happens to feature an economist, and not merely a book about economics in the atmospheric sense that microeconomics in the first place is mostly a way to theorize individual choices. Instead, I want to briefly explore the claim I made earlier that my book is about economics in the more grounded sense that it takes up the lines between individual choice, fertility, sexuality, and family life. All of these are in my view economic issues.
Let’s start with the issue of fertility. I think fertility is almost definitionally a subtext in any heterosexual relationship. I’m proud that I bring up the topic unusually frontally, and I hope humorously, in the romance novel I wrote. But fertility and birthrates also connect to economic and urban policy.
The fertility issue is rooted uncomfortably not just in personal choices but also in gender relationships, and I try to show one flavor of this in my book. As a policy issue though, this is conservative-coded topic that is often toxically demagogued from the right (witness J.D. Vance’s infamous comments about childless cat ladies). But this fact doesn’t make the issue any less urgent (here I disagree tonally with Alice Evans, a writer with a great Substack who I otherwise admire). For a fascinating flavor of how both declining fertility and increased isolation have affected the fabric of urban (and rural) life in Japan see this episode of the excellent travel podcast Personal Landscapes. See also this recent Substack post by prolific journalist and author Derek Thompson, which provides some interesting takes on birth rates as a policy issue.
Connected to child bearing is child care, clearly an economic policy issue and one that is much more liberal-coded than the issue of fertility. I’ve written about child care on Prospericity more than once in the past, most recently here. I’m proud to say that my novel is unusual in that it frames child care to a significant degree as a men’s issue. For instance, the James character consciously leans into, if not so much child care, then actively spending time with Beth and her daughter together as his relationship with his older girlfriend evolves. He makes a point of engaging with Beth where she is at, which in part is as a mother, and makes this an explicit aspect of his bid for her romantic affections.
Child care is also an issue in Beth’s troubled relationship with her partner and his girlfriend. We get a brief view early in the novel of these three characters awkwardly negotiating care for Beth’s little girl. But the partner and the girlfriend are minor characters in the book. Most of Beth’s home life takes place off stage, as it were, and I don’t delve into the partner’s motivations.
Still, it seemed obvious to me as a male author that the partner took on the girlfriend to cope with the pressures of solo parenting, perhaps due to the loneliness connected to Beth being gone half the time, and almost because of certainly Beth’s refusal to marry him. So, I will admit to being taken aback at how many women readers have seen this character’s behavior as completely non-obvious, enraging, even villainous. This was not my intent as an author, and this difference in perspective perhaps points to a need for more heterosexual men writing (from a non-reactionary point of view) into the female-coded intellectual spaces of sex, relationships, and private family life.
A third economic policy issue that comes up in Love Economy relates to sexuality, relationships, and family stability in situations where a woman earns substantially more, and/or holds higher social status than her male partner. This is obviously the situation for Beth and my younger, relatively economically insecure protagonist James. It is also true in a more subtle way for James and his other love interest, an ambitious architecture student named Pilar who is my third central character. Pilar comes off in the book as more focused than James, more certain of her ability to achieve positive professional outcomes for herself if she works hard enough.
I’ll simply note here that a non-traditional economic power balance in heterosexual relationships is likely to become more, not less prominent as time passes. Numerous studies have shown that young women are more likely to do better in school and to graduate from college than young men. Related to this is a trend toward women bringing in higher shares of household income than their male partners, as shown in this Pew study.
All this of course sits alongside economic evidence of ongoing gender pay gaps, often related to what is called the motherhood penalty. But my point here is not so much to engage in hot debates about gender and economic fairness as to suggest that representations of what is desirable in a man have hardly shifted at all in the culture. Certainly in the romance novel genre, which is somewhat new to me despite having just written a romance novel of sorts, we have a decided overrepresentation of billionaire boyfriends, together with professional hockey player boyfriends and boyfriends well north of six feet tall sporting strangely girthy forearms.
Love Economy doesn’t fully break with this pattern—I’ve painted both the James character and Beth’s partner as full-on hunks, even if both are also a bit professionally loosey-goosey, very unlikely to hit billionaire status. I’m well aware, in other words, of both expectations in the romance marketplace and my own internalized expectations for how men are supposed to appear. But gender pay and power differentials are definitely an important economic issue; yet another issue area, moreover, where there is a paucity of non-reactionary heterosexual male voices (thank you to Richard Reeves for leading the way).