评论：性自由及其对经济增长和繁荣的影响

From theQuarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

[Sexual Freedom and Its Impact on Economic Growth and Prosperity,Feler Bose, Resource Publications, 2024; 196 pp.]

In Hayek’s Modern Family, the late Steven Horwitz (2015) asserted that sexual freedom is one of the blessings of economic liberty and prosperity. Feler Bose has dealt a serious blow to that thesis in Sexual Freedom and Its Impact on Economic Growth and Prosperity. In it, he provides a robust economic argument that sexual and economic freedom are inversely related, while providing numerous empirical illustrations of this relationship.

Much like Shawn Ritenour’s (2010) Foundations of Economics:A Christian View, Bose’s book draws on Protestant Christian theology and numerous biblical references—but it applies them to the relationship between sexual libertinism and economic degradation. While those who are uninterested in theological arguments or view such references as irrelevant might dismiss the relevance of these observations, Bose nevertheless skillfully and logically deploys them to great effect for those with Christian worldviews.

To illustrate Unwin’s hypothesis, Bose provides a matrix comparing societies that are more or less sexually free and those that are more or less economically free. In short, these freedoms are substitutes and not complements as Horwitz (2015) claimed. Indeed, Bose would regard Horwitz’s complementary view of sexual and economic freedoms as inherently unstable.

Table 1.Economic and Sexual Freedom Possibilities Matrix

来源：Bose（2024，图 1-1）。

In an abrupt shift from theoretical discussion about the Unwin thesis and the impact of the Kinsey report, Bose pivots to a methodological and empirical chapter that assesses sexual freedom in the United States from 1960 to 2010. Bose and coauthor Ari Kornelis construct a sexual freedom index using two subvariables, as illustrated below.

Table 2.Variables used for developing the Sexual Freedom Index and the category of each variable