A post in honor of "World Aids Day"

I've read that the Bush administration (and other conservative groups) are very interested in promoting "abstinence only" education programs, instead of condom use. On one hand, conservatives are correct when they point out that "waiting until you're married" is a 100% defence against AIDS, and a pretty good defence against pregnancy out of wedlock (which most accidental pregnancies are). But just how well do conservatives expect "just say no" to work? Do they expect to be able to stand against the human sex drive?

Here's how an economist might analyze the problem of AIDS education.

The number of AIDS cases per year is, let's say, A = pC(NT + (1-N)F)
Where A is the number of new AIDS cases.
C is the number of casual sex encounters
p is the proportion of casual sex encounters where one person has AIDS and the other does not.
N is the percentage of these encounters where no condoms are used.
T is the transmission rate of AIDS if you don't have a condom.
F is the failure rate of Condoms. (ie the conditional probability you will AIDS from a casual sex encounter even WITH a condom).

This equation is very simplified (I haven't tried to capture how risky a particular casual sex act is, for example), but it's good enough for my purposes.

Liberals look at the above equation and are interested in only one thing: reducing the amount of suffering caused by AIDS. The "objective function" of the liberals is min(A).... the fewer AIDS cases the better. The number of casual sex encounters itself is not important.

There are various approaches to that goal. T and F are pretty much fixed, so not much you can do about those. If you want to reduce A, you can try to reduce C, or you can try to reduce N. (or try to do both, obviously).

Now, liberals think that C (the number of casual sex encounters) is pretty inelastic. Wagging a finger and saying "just say no" is unlikely to have much effect against the power of millions of years of human sexual evolution. So, since F is pretty low, liberals are usually strongly in favour of condom-based sex education. They don't care about C, they just want to get N as low as possible.

However, conservatives view the problem differently. They say that they believe the right approach to reducing A is by reducing C. But why would they be opposed to reducing N at the same time? They feel that promoting condom use works against their goal of reducing C, that you can't say "abstinence is best.... oh and by the way, here are some condoms." Conservatives feel that people are like children, or maybe like a flock of sheep that need to be guided by the wise shepard, whereas liberals feel that adults are, well, adults, and can make up their own mind on these matters if they have all the facts.

I think what the conservatives are after is a cultural shift. They imagine that there was a time in Western Civilization where "that sort of thing just wasn't done" (ie, nobody had casual sex or even wanted to), and they want to go back to that time.

Leaving for the sexual historians the question of whether there ever was such a time, it seems to me that trying to engineer a wholesale cultural shift against casual sex is much, much more difficult (and less likely to succeed) than a campaign to persuade everybody to use a condoms.

In other words, I think the liberal approach is more likely to be effective in reducing AIDS.

However, I think conservatives are more interested in the above mentioned cultural shift AS A GOAL IN ITSELF than they are in reducing AIDS. AIDS, to conservatives, is a secondary phenomenon of lesser importance. To some conservatives it might be of no importance at all. Jerry Falwell came right out and said as much back in the 1980's: AIDS is God's punishment for immoral behaviour. In fact, if abstinence only programs were to reduce casual sex and condom use, but *increase* AIDS as a result (because condom use dropped by more than casual sex did) I believe that would be OK with most conservatives.

It seems to me that conservatives are more worried about "immorality" than they are about human happiness.