Economics and Math of LOVE !!!!

How many of you like economics? How many of you like math? How many of you think that love is beautiful? With this post, I aim to make some of the concepts of economics and maths clear to you, with reference to the almighty love!! But before we go to the jargons of these technical subjects, let’s know a little about love.

People say love is all about emotions, sharing, caring, being friends and being faithful to each other but believe me friends there is a lot more to it. There are rules, theories, equations, concepts and what not. Love could be

• familial , i.e. for parents, siblings, friends etc. or
• it could be romantic, our favorite, love for our beloved.

 But how does love happen?

• It could be love at first sight,or
• It may be that your friendship turns to love as they rightly quote, “love is friendship”or
• You are in love and you don’t know coz it just happened.

I guess the concept of love  is so far clear to you.  So now lets get to the terms of economics of love -

• Demand and supply – These are the quantity demanded by a consumer and supplied by producer respectively, at a given point of time and at a given price. So how does it relate to love? Lets take an example. Suppose .. just suppose I love Raj ! but Raj doesn’t love me!!  So there is supply of love from my side but no demand from his side. Poor me !!:(
• Then comes the concept of Cost- It is the amount incurred by a producer to produce a certain level of output. So, what is the cost of love? The time, money and energy I spent to get to Raj becomes my cost.. and friends, there is some opportunity cost as well. The time and money that I spent on gifts and dates with raj could have been used for strenthening my carreer ,or probably  for some other guy!!!
• Ordinal approach of consumer behaviour- Some economist has said that utility cannot be measured, but it can be ranked. The same happened with me. If Rahul loved me, but Raj loved me more than Rahul , so I ranked Raj above  rahul and chose him as he will give me more utility.
• Market- There are different types of markets - Lets talk about monopoly.. in this type of market,  there is one seller and lot of buyers. Think of it, in a neighborhood, there is 1 handsome hunk with amazing personality and obviously, there are sooo many girls who tend to fall in love with this gift of god. So , here this guy becomes the single seller and the girls become the buyers.  Now, lets talk about another form of market, which is, perfect competition. In this type there are lot of buyers and there are lot of sellers. Let’s take the example of my college, with so many boyz and so many gals around ,  there is no competition as far as love is concerned. With so many options, choose any,take any or dump any. 

I hope the concepts of economics are now clear to you.

Now as you would have understood how to relate the subject to love, lets quickly take up the cases for maths.

• You must have seen a girl chucking out the petals of a flower  saying, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not !! What is this ? This is actually a case of probability where the probability of being loved is ½ and being dumped is also ½.
• When a poor guy loves a rich girl and wants to get married, what does the father of the girl say? He says “We belong to two mutually exclusive families with nothing in common . how dare you you even look at my daughter?”
• In maths, 1+1 is always 2, but in love, its never like that . In love , 1+1 is either 3 , or 4, 5 and so on , and in case of our great grandfathers, 1+1 used to be cricket teams with many extras to it.

Friends, let me tell you that apart from economics and maths, love has some science connection too. See, there is some chemistry and definitely some biology involved. Since there is time constraint, I would not go into detail .

At the end , I would like to conclude by saying that, I truly understand, that eco and maths are very complex to understand , but if we relate it to love, the way I did... things would be really simple !!! So , the mantra is to learn the concepts  the way you want to, revise the probabilility of sailing or being dumped on the way … and I am sure you will have unbeatable conceptual clarity !!!

Cheers !

Shruti