Abstinence Only Education is Silly
The Bush administration stresses the importance of abstinence only education. Ignoring religious issues with premarital sex, does this policy have a chance of preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases? Any economist would say - NO!
Consider you have a child who wants to ride a bike. You can tell him he should not ride a bike because it is dangerous, or you can warn him to wear a helmet in the hope that this will one day save his life. Well, unless you are a parent who can physically stop him from riding a bike, and you can only do this for so long, your best bet is to suggest the helmet. Why? Because deciding whether or not to ride a bike is a fairly large decision. An economist might coin the word dutility (Decision Utility - Pronounced like Utility but with a D), and say that deciding whether or not to go for a ride takes about 20 of these ‘dutils’ (Like the economic construct utility). The idea is that larger decisions require more dutils making them less responsive to any particular source of input *. As much as you lecture about the dangers of bike riding, it would probably be fairly difficult to overcome this 20 dutil decision with a simple diatribe. Deciding whether or not to wear a helmet is a much less costly. It’s not time-consuming to don one, it’s not particularly annoying to wear one, and most importantly, it does not interfere with the larger decision of whether or not to go for a ride. Let’s guess this takes about half a dutil. For such a low cost, the added safety seems pretty worthwhile. Much like a stream, it is easier to gently alter its course than cause it to run uphill.
Now let’s consider sex. Deciding whether or not to have sex for the first time is a much larger decision than whether or not to ride a bike. Let’s say that for the average American this decision is worth 500 dutils. Perhaps this number is much higher. Whether or not a person decides to have sex before marriage requires consideration of many factors, including sex drive, love, lust, peer pressure, potentially sexually transmitted diseases, religion, etc. So many factors are in play that any one of them is unlikely to have a significant impact. Thus sex education, while perhaps having a 5 dutil influence, is unlikely to change the behavior of a person. On the other hand, deciding whether or not to use protection is a much smaller decision- akin to wearing a bike helmet. Asking someone to use protection is not asking them to do a u-turn, just to bear a very so slight right. Maybe this happens to be a 3 dutil decision for the average person. Whatever the unquantifiable dutility, evidence shows that sex education is far more effective than abstinence only education.
* This need not be true. A person who is on edge about a decision can be easily swayed. We can start to think about marginal dutility as being more important that total dutility.