Green-tinted Glasses

And Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou consume the righteous with the wicked? - [Genesis 18:23]

In Genesis 18, God informs Abraham that he plans to destroy the city of Sodom because of its immorality. Verses 23 to 32 then depicts Abraham bargaining with the Lord over Sodom, which implicitly reveals God’s demand curve for punishment.

God first makes his demands in verse 26:

The LORD said, “If I find 50 innocent people inside the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

Through some shrewd bargaining Abraham manages to find God’s reservation price: he lowers the price from 50 innocents to 40, then 30, then 20, and finally the deal is struck at 10.

Then he said, “Oh may the Lord not be angry, and I shall speak only this once; suppose ten are found there?” And He said, “I will not destroy it on account of the ten.”

I wonder why God even bothered bargaining, since He has quite a fair bit of monopoly power. Anyhow, this passage gives us valuable insights into God’s economic behaviour. Had the writers of the Bible taken EC101 they would have thought of including this very useful city-punishment model:

We infer from Abraham’s conversation with God that His demand curve shows an inverse relationship between the number of innocents in a city and the level of destruction that He was willing to dish out.

Presumably when there are 50 innocents He is quite satisfied to let the matter go with a verbal warning. But when the number of innocents falls below 10 (i.e. 9) God goes into destroyer mode and wipes out the whole city (which is exactly what happened to Sodom).

This model would have been useful to other ’sin cities’ like Gomorrah - it may have helped them avoid the “brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven” that eventually killed them off. Had they known better they would have quickly imported just enough innocents from other cities to meet the minimum price for not being wiped out (10), and thus minimise God’s consumer surplus while still maximising their utility from sin.

Why import? Because Gomorrah will suffer a free-rider problem: given that only 10 people need to be goody-goodies, no one would want to give up his debauched life, hoping that others will do it instead.