ABSTRACT
Teaching MSc economics students provides a yardstick of public perceptions of the causes of high HIV prevalence. MSc students are all well-informed, rightly horrified by the ravages of HIV and the high prevalence in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and fundamentally divided in opinion. Usually, the class splits neatly down the middle. On the one hand are students who think that HIV prevalence is high in Africa because the people there do not know how HIV is transmitted. On the other hand, many students believe that the cause is the sexual norms of Africans themselves. This is reflective of the general debate, which revolves around the extent to which HIV prevalence is determined by individual preferences for risk-taking. O'Laughlin says the assumption that ‘if people practice risky sexual behaviour, they do so either because they do not have adequate information or because they choose not to understand the risk’ (2006: 4) is the dominant approach to HIV. I will set out both of these arguments further in this chapter.
