article: Is Robin Hanson America’s Creepiest Economist?

[MatureDJ]

Robin Hanson Might Be America’s Creepiest Economist

He seems to believe that men are owed sex, that women are devious about it, and that it's OK to lightly toy with questions about rape.

slate.com

Over the years, the libertarian-leaning professor has become notorious in certain circles for his odd and disconcerting dips into socio-sexual commentary; he once mused on his blog, for instance, about whether women who suffered a “gentle, silent rape” were really worse off than men who experienced infidelity. Last week, Hanson was back at it again. In a post that left many readers agog, he decided to use a heinous incident of misogynistic violence as an opportunity to contemplate the concept of “redistributing” sex to men who have trouble getting laid.

His brief post is more or less a lame attempt to compare people who worry about income inequality with incels who worry about “sexual inequality,” and suggest that they’re maybe not so different. “One might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income,” he writes, “and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met.”

Later, he imagines the policies that this new political movement of libidinously frustrated young men might want to enact—“Sex could be directly redistributed, or cash might be redistributed in compensation”—and puzzles over the fact that society doesn’t seem to take their concerns very seriously. “Strikingly, there seems to be little overlap between those who express concern about income and sex inequality. Among our cultural elites, the first concern is high status, and the later concern low status.”

... he clearly thinks sexually frustrated men have a legitimate complaint about society and doesn’t seem to understand why their concerns are any less valid than those of people who’ve been ground down by the machinations of capitalism and working for poverty wages. In fact, this is an issue he has been pondering for years. In 2007, he decided it was worth contemplating why people feel sympathy for men who steal because they’re hungry, but not for men who rape women because they can’t find a willing partner. In a 2009 post about men’s rights activism, he wrote that “beta male complains [sic] about sex-starvation, and many other male complaints all seem to me legitimate candidates for group complaints.” In a follow-up, he copped to “being puzzled by what kinds of inequality bother people, and what kinds do not.”

my opinion: This is my hero.