Heidi Montag Shows That Plastic Surgery Doesn’t Work

Heidi Montag Shows That Plastic Surgery Doesn’t Work

Or at least that’s one possible interpretation of this little story about Heidi Montag and her exercise regime/plastic surgery.

Before she slipped back into a bikini for Saturday’s party at Las Vegas’ Wet Republic — the last time she was photographed in a two-piece was April 2010 — Heidi Montag spent some serious time in the gym.

There’s a concept that economists like to ponder (economists’ opinion on Ms. Montag is, shamefully, as yet unsurveyed).

Are things, activities, complements or substitutes?

A complement (no, not a compliment) is something that works well together. Fries and ketchup, mustard and roast beef, or in something that has actually been studied by economists, the connection between online pornography and rape.

A substitute is rather different: instead of working well together, like a complement, a substitute is an either or. With food it’s either rice or pasta, either beef or seafood (and yes, there’s surf n’ turf where they are a complement).

With that online pornography and rape there are those that say that as men see more of it, see more objectification of women, they become more likely to rape. There are also those who posit that more porn means, well, more of that solitary activity which accompanies it, and thus less rape as those who would rape have dealt with their sexual urges in a private manner.

In the economists’ terms, are pornography and rape complements, in which case more of one means more of the other, or are they substitutes, in which case more of one will mean less of the other?

That rape rates, incidences, have fallen hugely over the recent decades as the internet brings the pictures to all would seem to be an argument that they are substitutes, not complements. Indeed, there’s a study out there which claims to track this by state as broadband expands (which, annoyingly, I cannot find right now despite my haing written at least one article on it years ago). As broadband arrives, rape rates decline.

But what’s this got to do with Ms. Montag? Well, famously, she:

After famously undergoing 10 cosmetic surgeries in late 2009,

And I had always thought that cosmetic surgery was a substitute for working out in the gym. Now I find out that it’s merely a complement. If you do the one then you have to do the other still, as well.

Agreed, unless beer bellies, freckles and excessive hair are going to be the new thing I’m unlikely to be invited to any bikini parties but the thought that one has to both go under the knife and also exercise rather puts me off both. For I’d always thought that the plastic surgery part was to avoid having to do the work, was a substitute for the working out.

Apparently not.