Article May 16, 2011 Issue

The economics of living love

By Mark Patterson

It was a hot May afternoon, and I was sitting in my last college class of my senior year at the University of California at Davis. Our professor had walked us through all the permutations of urban economics. I’d finished the examinations, written my last blue book, and was, like my fellow students, expecting a fairly low-key final lecture. And indeed it started off that way.

Then our professor surprised us.

He said he’d talked with us all quarter about the impact of economics on people, about how it can form and move them, about how the concept of the “invisible hand” of self-interest can work. But now, in this last lecture, he wanted to talk with us about something more radical. It wasn’t the economics of self-interest. It was the “economics of love.”

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