Fear is at the heart of the sexual revolution, and its most fitting monument is the "hook-up." Dr. Morse exposes the sexual revolution’s fraudulent promise of freedom and fearlessly explodes some of modern society’s most cherished—and destructive—myths. She argues that strong, lasting marriages are essential for the survival of a free society, not to mention basic human happiness. She fires the opening shots of a new sexual revolution and shows how everyone, married or single, can help.
Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. is the founder and President of the Ruth Institute — a project of the National Organization for Marriage — which seeks to promote life-long married love to college students by creating an intellectual and social climate favorable to marriage.
She is also the Senior Research Fellow in Economics at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.
She is the author of Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World, (2005) and Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn’t Work (2001), recently reissued in paperback, as Love and Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.
Dr. Morse served as a Research Fellow for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from 1997-2005. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rochester in 1980 and spent a postdoctoral year at the University of Chicago during 1979-80. She taught economics at Yale University and George Mason University for 15 years. She was John M. Olin visiting scholar at the Cornell Law School in fall 1993. She is a regular contributor to the National Review Online, National Catholic Register, Town Hall, MercatorNet and To the Source.
fan pageDr. Morse’s scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of Political Economy, Economic Inquiry, the Journal of Economic History, Publius: the Journal of Federalism, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Social Philosophy and Policy, The Independent Review, and The Notre Dame Journal of Law Ethics and Public Policy.
In April 2008, Dr. Morse presented at the Harvard conference, “The Legacy and Future of Feminism.” In July 2006, Dr. Morse was one of the few Americans who lectured at the Fifth Annual Meeting of Families in Valencia Spain, sponsored by the Pontifical Council on the Family. Dr. Morse lectured in Rome in April 1997 and in January 2006 at Acton Institute conferences celebrating the Papal encyclical, Centesimus Annus. Her public policy articles have appeared in Forbes, Policy Review,The American Enterprise, Fortune, Reason, the Wall Street Journal, Vital Speeches, and Religion and Liberty.
She currently lives in San Diego, CA. She and her husband are the parents of a birth child, an adopted child. From March 2003 to August 2006, Dr. Morse and her husband were foster parents for San Diego County. During that time, they cared for a total of eight foster children.
This is a book on sex written by an economist so you can imagine just how unconventional the content and style gets. I enjoyed this because there is a definite structure to her writing, for every chapter there is an introduction, a body, and a conclusion (cleverly subtitled…you guessed it…”conclusion”). She presents some interesting arguments to debunk some of the premises espousing the importance of engaging in premarital sex as the road to a successful relationship. This is done of course in a way only an economist can do. Her arguments for me were reasonably successful, but I can see how others may find reasons to disagree with this assessment.
I enjoyed this book because it took a bit of a different tact (not that I have read many books in this genre) on this subject and came to some interesting and discussion worthy conclusions.
Strange! Decidedly very interesting. This is a woman who seems to be a reformed everything. Reformed "career woman", reformed libertarian, reformed liberal, reformed lapsed Catholic... this makes her view interesting. A view which is decidedly mildly undefinable, but for the fact of viewing the current sex culture as lacking the view that persons/the state of their lives are gifts. I read a lot of books about where we are going with this current attitude our culture has on sex... this book was unlike much of the genre for its emphasis on economics. Very (reformed?) libertarian.
A fabulous look by an economist at the question of marriage and relationships in this current culture. A must read. Out of print, so find it on Amazon or the like...
An important, well-written and argued book. A free society depends so much on love, strong marriages and “self-giving, rightly understood”, than we could ever imagine.