The other day I happened to overhear a conversation between two people, neither of them fundamentalists or right-wingers of any stripe. The theme of their dialogue was that adopting a gay lifestyle was a conscious, voluntary choice for most homosexuals.
This didn’t sound right to me: it seems that most of the research I’ve heard about points in the other direction: that gay people are essentially “born that way.” Then it struck me that we are now in the midst of a natural experiment that could perhaps settle the argument.
Read on...
First, let me digress and talk about natural experiments for a minute. In many branches of science it’s easy to set up experiments: a chemist can simply mix two substances together, add heat, and analyze the resulting stuff to see what’s in it. But if you’re an astrophysicist wondering what happens when two galaxies collide, that’s a tough event to set up in the lab. So you try to find two galaxies that are actually colliding, and watch what happens.
Economists are in much the same boat as astrophysicists. If, say, you want to know whether increasing the minimum wage affects unemployment, you should ideally find two identical countries, enact two different wage policies, and monitor the results. Of course, this isn’t going to happen in the real world, so economists look for “natural” situations that approximate the thing they want to test. (In the minimum wage case, they consider two neighboring states with different wage policies, and compare counties located along the border, which presumably are quite similar except for their minimum wage.)
What does this have to do with whether gayness is a choice? Consider the economics.
One of the concepts most beloved of economic theory is that of the rational actor, or homo economicus. This admittedly mythical individual approaches all of life’s choices in the same way: by carefully considering the costs and benefits of each alternative, totaling them up, and dispassionately choosing the option that maximizes utility--the net difference between the option’s pluses and minuses. Now, honest economists will admit that people don’t always behave rationally, but pretending that they do can yield many useful insights.
So let’s imagine a person--a rational actor--who has no pre-existing preference for being gay or straight. To them, it’s a simple matter of choosing whichever lifestyle has the greatest utility: do the benefits outweigh the costs, and by how much?
I’m not qualified to comment on the pluses of being gay, but like everyone else I’ve seen plenty of dramatic illustrations of its minuses: ostracizing, intimidation, violence, murder, employment discrimination, and marriage inequality, to name a few.
But as we’ve seen, things are changing. Though the battle is far from won, the minuses of being gay (at least in some parts of America) have declined noticeably. At the same time, I’ll hypothesize that the pluses have stayed about the same, or perhaps gone up somewhat.
In economic terms, this means that the utility of being gay has increased substantially over the last decade or so, and looks to increase even more in the future. I could even suggest that the utility of being straight has gone down, because straight people can no longer count on nearly-universal prejudice in their favor.
What this means, of course, is that the gay-vs.-straight “decision” has become a much closer call than it used to be. People who were on the fence and used to fall into the “straight” pool should now be much more likely to tip the other way.
The bottom line is that IF it’s true that being gay is a rational choice, then we should be seeing a lot more people choosing it these days. On the other hand, if it’s something that most people don’t really have a choice about, then the percentage of homosexuals in the population should remain roughly constant.
And there’s your natural experiment in Gayconomics.
BIG CAVEAT: choosing a gay lifestyle is NOT the same as coming out! If we see more people acting gay, that doesn’t mean that more people are gay. “Closeted gay” is a type of gay lifestyle, presumably with its own utility function.