Where Calculation Ends

Economics is at its strongest where a hidden constraint needs to be found. It asks what is scarce, which information is unevenly distributed, who can refuse, onto whom the cost of a decision has been shifted, and how today’s action will change tomorrow’s incentives. These questions bring back into the picture things that romantic language likes to declare base: money, housing, time, care, health, documents, access to friends and the ability to survive a break-up. They stay base only until the first illness, birth or job loss; after that it turns out that a large part of freedom was made of exactly these.

Economics optimises only the goal it has been given. It can show what will increase the number of introductions, household income, the probability that a union continues or total satisfaction, but it does not choose between these quantities. A couple can trade income for time with the children, familiar security for a risky move, preservation of the institution for the right to leave. Calculation makes the price of a value visible. When the argument moves from consequences to which consequences are worthy, the decision goes back to the people.

Some constraints cannot honestly be converted into one more currency. Consent is not exchangeable for a rise in the couple’s total pleasure; sex without consent does not become efficient because of the other person’s gain. Safety, dignity and the right to leave set the limits of the admissible problem. Economic models can work with prohibitions, rights and minimum guarantees, but they receive them from outside — from law, ethics, politics and human experience.

Finally, explanation does not exhaust experience. Attachment can be described through learning, neurotransmitters and repeated interactions; after that, missing one particular person does not become any less particular. It can be shown that a shared history creates capital specific to the couple, but the word “capital” does not contain a Sunday morning, a family joke known to two people, or the way one of them notices without words that the other is tired. A scientific model is obliged to compress reality, otherwise it would be the size of reality itself and would stop explaining anything. The trouble starts when the discarded part of reality is forgotten.