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How a call girl can earn far more by actually working far less
- aresant 16y agoDisclaimer: Freakonomics to me embodies modern business writing at its worst. Anecdotal, single case half-correlations that try to pretend they’re something more than fluff entertainment. In this article, they truly don’t disappoint. A hilarious and misguided glorification of what, I imagine, is a soul crushing business for 99/100 prostitutes. Written like a recruiting pamphlet, to boot. And the answer to how a prostitute can earn far more by working far less? Price elasticity of demand! Stunning discovery Freakonomics. /End Rant
- zaidf 16y agois a soul crushing business for 99/100 prostitutes How is that conclusion much better than the one you're attacking?
- cglee 16y agoI think his point in that example was that articles that seek to glorify something that supports human trafficking, sex slavery, and forced rape - all of which millions are currently victims - should be based on more than conjecture and assumptions.
- aresant 16y agoSpot on.
- lukesandberg 16y agowhat particular pieces of conjecture and assumptions are you referring to? Unless i read it wrong (which is always a possibility) the article was one half empirical description of the market for prostitution and one half case study of how a particular prostitute discovered a lucrative market niche.
- cglee 16y agoDidn't read the article, just saying what I thought the parent poster was trying to say.
- aresant 16y agoFair enough. Me vs. Professor of Economics Steven Levitt: Levitt: 1 hand-picked prostitue that was a guest lecturer in his college class. Me: - PROSTITUTION IS THE MOST DANGEROUS JOB IN AMERICA. The murder rate is 1 in 490. Compare that to the fishing industry, where the death rate is 1 in 775. - Eighty-two percent of prostitutes reported having been physically assaulted since entering prostitution. - Women trafficked to the United States have been forced to have sex with 400-500 men to pay off $40,000 in debt for their passage. - Statistics show that at least 2/3 of prostitutes began working in prostitution before the age of 16 Like Levitt I decided to provide points that suit my argument. Sources are from top 3 results in Google for "prostitution statistics": http://www.bayswan.org/stats.html http://www.bayswan.org/stats.html http://kiss951.radio.com/2010/04/29/seven-statistics-about-prostitutes/ http://kiss951.radio.com/2010/04/29/seven-statistics-about-p... http://womensissues.about.com/od/rapesexualassault/a/Wuornos.htm http://womensissues.about.com/od/rapesexualassault/a/Wuornos...
- dotcoma 16y agoI think high-level and low-level prostitution are two almost completely different businesses.
- yardie 16y agoYes, one is on-demand by phone, and the other is on-demand at the street corner. In both cases you don't know how they got there (whether by choice or force) and most johns don't care to ask.
- trustfundbaby 16y agoTotally different clientele. Ask this lady http://www.realprincessdiaries.com/ http://www.realprincessdiaries.com/
- jacquesm 16y agoIf you're at work you probably don't want to click that link.
- kragen 16y agoI recommend talking to prostitutes or reading about their lives instead of imagining them. Sudhir has talked to a bunch of them, I've talked to a few, you imply you haven't. There's a lot of diversity among prostitutes, which the article does a better job of representing than you do. I think you'll have to look long and hard before finding anything that's true of 99/100 prostitutes. There are certainly plenty of people whose souls have been crushed by prostitution, but it's by no means a universal experience. Reliable statistics are quite difficult to come by. I strongly suspect that people like "Allie" don't show up in the denominators of the stats you cite in your other comment. Farley and Barkan (where the about.com article got its stats) were interviewing street prostitutes, not all prostitutes; the KISS 95.1 page doesn't cite any sources, so they probably just made up their numbers, but still, being 99.8% certain of not dying on the job doesn't seem like a major risk. It seems like the possibly high risk of being raped or otherwise traumatized is more relevant.
- rokhayakebe 16y ago$300/hour? That is one of the highest paying job i ever heard of.
- danilocampos 16y agoBetter to go to law school and specialize. I once worked with a big time tech lawyer. For three hours work, we paid him what I made pre-tax in two weeks, and I wasn't doing terribly for that point in my life. Pretty sure he's not getting beat up by any pimps when he strolls into work each day, either. He worked really hard, too. I mean, I wasn't paying the bills, but he definitely seemed worth the cash. Filed some awesome stuff for us -- you don't often read legalese that entertaining.
- JacobAldridge 16y agoThere is a difference between 'charge-out hourly rate' and 'hourly rate of pay'. Even high end lawyers are unlikely to be paid more than one-third of their charge out rate, unless they're partners (ie, business 'owners'). You probably took that into consideration with your response - I'm not disagreeing with you, just making it clearer. And yes, there are many jobs where the pay rate exceeds $300 / hour. In my field (business coaching - no formal qualifications necessary, though they may help) a Harvard Business Review study found the average charge-out rate is $500/hr, the top measure is $2400/hr, and most practitioners work solo so don't split that fee with anyone else.
- ryanlchan 16y agoI find this true for just about every professional services field. Hiring a lawyer, an accountant, a doctor, or a consultant often comes at a rate multiple times their own salaries. But the difference is that the lawyer was probably working 50-60 billable hours a week, whereas an escort (or a business coach, presumably) will work significantly less than that.
- hugh3 16y agoIf you can bill $craploads per hour, why work 50-60 hours a week? I'd work 30. Maybe 20.
- lotusleaf1987 16y agoThe best part is at the end when the monkey pays another monkey for sex.
- daniel-cussen 16y agoI think that's part of the origin of human evolution (this started happening after women started having hidden estrus).
- ithkuil 16y agoor seeing the same thing the other way around: hidden estrus was evolved in order to get more for less Schroder, Inge. "Concealed Ovulation and Clandestine Copulation: a Female Contribution to Human Evolution." Ethology and Sociobiology 14.6 (1993): 381-89.
- olalonde 16y agoI saw it coming at "pretty much focused on food and sex".
- chmike 16y agoBonobo monkeys have been seen trading food (fruits) for sex. What is new for me here is that they adopted a currency.
- helveticaman 16y agoBut that's just like buying a woman dinner. It's arguably about sharing a gift and having an experience. Money is a (perhaps small) step further.
- philwelch 16y agoQuibble: bonobos are apes, not monkeys.
- chmike 16y ago
- crazydiamond 16y agovery long-winded. essentially, she charged more and became a high-end sex worker.
- dublinclontarf 16y agoHmmmf, $500 is a little less than what I get for one month full time as an English teacher :-/
- roel_v 16y agoWell I guess that the comparison is meaningless with someone who lives in a 2nd tier Chinese city...
- dublinclontarf 16y agoIt's got me thinking on changing professions.
- roel_v 16y agoDo you have any idea of how much a prostitute in a Chinese city would make? Is there any open reporting, human interest reporting or something like that in China? Is prostitution visible at all?
- csomar 16y agoSorry but you are comparing prostitute to teaching? Even if you get paid higher with the former, will you declare your work publicly? No! Why? You have the answer.
- crpatino 16y agoYou do not seem to have got the point at all. It is not about the profession, it is all about decommoditization. The first and most important thing she (unknowingly) did right was to avoid having a pimp in the first place. The second important thing she did was to differentiate her service and offer it to the premium market. You can follow the same strategy as a teacher. Refuse to lecture a class of 50+ students* (where the break even point for the school is 5-10). Seek instead to position yourself as a personal tutor for the children of the wealthy. You will find out that you need to provide a quality of service way beyond what is expected of an average classroom instructor, and also you will have to tolerate your customers idiosyncrasies. But, hey... you would have to do that anyway! * I am going to the outliers here. 50+ students is the low end of a continuous. I am just trying to draw a parallel to the other example in the article (the $18k/yr street hooker).
- lionhearted 16y agoProblems with the article: > Throughout history, it has invariably been easier to be male than female. Yes, this is an overgeneralisation and yes, there are exceptions, but by any important measure, women have had it rougher than men. This one is a PC-friendly thing to say, the opposite point of view is not. If you haven't read it, I must urge you to check out the excellent "Is There Anything Good About Men?" essay by Roy Baumeister: http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm Across history, it's estimated that 80% of women all-time had children, whereas only 40% of men did - the majority of men died without descendents. Things like that. Definitely check out Baumeister's essay. > In any arena you look — education, legal and voting rights, career opportunities and so on — it is far better to be a woman today than at any other point in history. At the risk of being controversial, I would point out unhappiness, depression, and suicide are all massively up in those countries among women. I think - I'm hoping - that we're in a transition phase while society gets acclimated to having women as equal participants in the labor market. For a while, being traditionally feminine (focusing on beauty, kind temperament and disposition, managing a household, and raising children) was out of fashion and seen to be a lesser choice, despite the fact that women who act in that traditional role actually have higher happiness levels, lower depression levels, and lower suicide levels than women who are working in so-so positions. As the risk of being controversial, I'll say I firmly understand why a woman would give up these traditional pursuits of being a good wife and mother in order to be an excellent scientist, architect, artist, or entrepreneur, but I have no idea why a woman would rather be a low level middle manager or a clerk instead of being a wife, mother, and active member of the community. Motherhood seems to me like it'd be more enjoyable and more rewarding than all but the most satisfying and self-actualizing of professions. I know this is controversial, but I'm hoping society will adjust to a point where traditional femininity can peacefully coexist as a respected choice for women on how to live their lives, because I think it can be a suitable, powerful, happy, and meaningful for choice for many women, and it'd be a shame if a woman was peer-pressured to do a job she hates because "just getting married and being a housewife" is stigmatized these days.
- jacquesm 16y ago> it'd be a shame if a woman was peer-pressured to do a job she hates because "just getting married and being a housewife" is stigmatized these days. The pressure does not come from being stigmatized but from the fact that a single person income is not enough to feed a family of four in plenty of places. And if you don't have children and your spouse is out working you might as well go to work yourself, rather than to hang around the house all day, and increase your expendable income. edit: Yet another factor, it makes you feel good to not be a dependent but to bring in your own share of the household money.
- maxklein 16y agoI'm not sure if what they are saying applies to the first girl they speak about. A street hooker cannot easily transition to a highly paid escort. You need to be pretty and young at least, to earn that much. And the street hookers, if they increased their prices, would have no customers.
- joe_the_user 16y agoBingo... That's the problem I saw in this many-problem'ed article.
- Locke1689 16y agoI'd bet it's a lot harder than simply looking good. The article stated that the incidents became longer and more complex the higher the price rose. The customer expected to have a conversation. Given that she's now charging something only affordable by the upper/upper-middle class, one can expect her population to be highly educated. I doubt that if she were not already highly educated (and probably well-read, as well) she wouldn't be nearly as competitive. Of course, isn't that the market acting? How common is a highly educated prostitute who could choose between dozens of alternative, legal, well-paying professions. A lifetime of education is one hell of a marketable asset (and competitive advantage).
- kragen 16y agoAlso, Allie is almost certainly white, and she had a lot of money and skill to invest into things like house furnishings and building a web site.
- dannyr 16y agoThis reminded of an App Store developer I met a few months ago who had an app selling for $10. He was working too much answering too many technical support questions. What he did was increase the price of the app to $25. Less people purchased his app but his revenue is about the same. The volume of technical support questions dropped significantly because he has less users.
- wccrawford 16y agoI used to play a MUD called DragonRealms. They charged $10 for a basic account and $30 for premium. The servers were quite crowded and there was a fair bit of lag. Suddenly they announced a price hike to $15 and $40. Many of the old-timers left. The servers weren't as crowded and laggy. Everyone called them greedy at the time, but I theorized that they did it because they couldn't scale their servers any more and they had to find a way to earn as much money but have fewer customers. Since they're still in business and haven't lowered their prices yet, I'd say it worked.
- Kliment 16y agoI found the second article (hidden beneath the credits and the book ads) about monkeys adopting currency much more interesting. I know people who do primate research and it doesn't surprise me in the least, but it's much more interesting than the first, which can be summarized as "high-end prostitutes have a good life and make a lot of money, low-end prostitutes have a shitty life and make no money" with the rest being a mix of stereotypes and overconvoluted explanations of the demand curve.
- ab9 16y agoAllie is not "earning far more by actually working far less." That implies that working less causes her to make more money. Rather, she's earning more by charging more, and she was able to do that because she had complementary skills that she didn't know to market until price experimentation attracted a different kind of customer. As a side effect, her higher hourly rate gives her the freedom of working less. Perhaps there could be a market for prostitutes who don't have sex very often, if there were a way for prospective clients to verify this. But that's not Allie's business strategy.
- yason 16y agoThe point wasn't that she was underpricing herself: it was that by charging more she gradually found herself offering quite different services. For $300/hour her clients were still wishing to physically get the most out of her (and, apparently, themselves) during the one hour; for $500/hour she started to find clients who were more interested in high-class flirtation, having a wife replacement for the evening, and the sex portion was reduced to a lot less.
- ab9 16y agoThanks, I've edited my comment. You're right that it's less an issue of underpricing per se, and more that she had complementary skills that she wasn't taking advantage of. The fact remains that working less did not, in itself, add value for the customers.
- varjag 16y agoI wonder how she does her taxes.
- gaius 16y agoHa ha, a little while ago The Times did a reader's questions interview with Belle du Jour and all anyone wanted to know was if she'd paid her taxes. Yes, she said, her accountant does it as any other professional services.
- varjag 16y agoThen if it's legal, why the implicit threat of police raid is in the article?
- gaius 16y agoIANAL but while prostitution isn't illegal almost every supporting activity is (e.g. soliciting). The British police are always looking for easy ways to boost their statistics. PS This tells you everything you need to know about Times readers (of which I am one). We don't care what consenting adults get up to on private property so long as their civic duty is fulfilled.
- erikstarck 16y ago"There is one labour market women have always dominated: prostitution." Uhm. No. The most common prostitute is a man selling sex to another man.
- wan23 16y ago[citation needed]
- erikstarck 16y agoI only have links in Swedish but there was a report published a few years ago about prostitution in the Nordics saying that 2.0% of all men and 1.6% of all women had ever sold sex: http://nyheter24.se/nyheter/utrikes/160704-fler-man-an-kvinnor-saljer-sex http://nyheter24.se/nyheter/utrikes/160704-fler-man-an-kvinn... It also concluded that most of these men were homosexual. Here's the report (actually it's in Norwegian): http://kilden.forskningsradet.no/publikasjon/vis.html?tid=58067 http://kilden.forskningsradet.no/publikasjon/vis.html?tid=58...
- philwelch 16y agoYou have what percentage of each gender have ever been prostitutes, but what are the comparative market shares of either gender? What percentage of paid sex in a given year is satisfied by female prostitutes, and which percentage by males? Maybe that 1.6% of women sell way, way, way more sex than that 2.0% of men. It's certainly plausible, since there's a higher demand for heterosexual sex than homosexual sex. So while more prostitutes seem to be men, perhaps most prostitution still involves female prostitutes.
- c00p3r 16y agoIt is all about 'to find a [micro] niche', using Internet or other 'connections'. ^_^
- tianaco 16y ago"So the real puzzle isn’t why someone like Allie becomes a prostitute, but rather why more women don’t choose this career." Most women don't do this because of the social stigma, and those that don't care about the social stigma don't do it because they don't want to contract STDs--in particular, Genital Herpes which can be transmitted through skin-to-skin contact. I'm surprised that the article didn't examine the health risks of the business. I'm certain that a high class escort is safer from health risks than someone who works on the street, but how much safer? That is information I'd be interested to learn. That said, I have several friends--women and homosexual men--that have done and do this type of work. When they talk about it, they always say that they "love it." They do it for awhile and pay off some debt. Then they inevitably age out of it or go onto work that they find more meaningful. This article confirmed the stories they told me.
- kragen 16y ago> Most women don't do this because of the social stigma, and those that don't care about the social stigma don't do it because they don't want to contract STDs You know, some people don't do it because they don't want to, just like there are plenty of people who don't collect garbage because they don't want to.
- tianaco 16y agoI took that as a given, kragen. Perhaps I should have prefaced my remark with: "for those women who are interested in the profession...." [edit] it's interesting though - amongst homosexual men, there's significantly less stigma against prostitution AND significantly less care about the health risks. There's also more men who are doing it and they make less money than the women.
- georgecmu 16y agoI posted a critical view of sentiments expressed in this article a while back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1573319 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1573319
- mturmon 16y agoUseful post. It addresses some of the facile comments above that the Freakonomics article is just about business/pricing strategy, by calling out some of the non-economic opinions pushed in the article. ("Allie is like the ideal wife", Allie is successful because she sees good in everyone, etc.) It's glib and myopic -- concentrating on this little aspect of pricing, and highlighting all the sunny and upbeat sides of being a prostitute, passing over the bad stuff almost completely.
- tianaco 16y agoBut what are the bad things for a high-end escort? They wrote about how she felt like she couldn't communicate about her career. They also wrote that a lot of the safety issues that plague low end prostitutes weren't issues for Allie. The main bad thing that they didn't speak about were health concerns.
- dkarl 16y agoThe article misses everything that isn't economic. That might sound appropriate for economics, but economics is influenced by human behavior, and human behavior is influenced by a lot more than economic factors. For instance, to say that a high-end prostitute working fifteen hours a week is more like a trophy wife than like a street hooker is utterly oblivious to the many, many obligations a trophy wife has. Being a trophy wife is, if not a full-time job, at least a half-time job. A trophy wife has to fulfill all the expectations of a wife of her social class, and fulfill them exceptionally well. She has to entertain. She has to manage a household. She has to manage her social life and social image, and often her husband's as well. Often a trophy wife has to bear and raise children. Of all the duties of a trophy wife, having sex with her husband is among the least essential. I would wager it is the most negotiable, the most often neglected, and the least likely to cause serious dissatisfaction on the husband's part. After all, a husband can develop other sexual interests, but his social image is built around his one wife.