"Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult." - Charlotte Whitton, Canada Month, June 1963

Yay, I finally found the source of this misandristic quote!

***

Feminism vs Economics
(on SuperFreakonomics)


A: Levitt and Dubner strike me as what, in Internet parlance, are known as "trolls" - contrarian attention-seekers.

Sady Doyle has a nice take-down of their "analysis" (if we can dignify it with the term) of prostitution here:

http://www.guard ian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/oct/21/superfreakonomics-prostitution-dubner-levitt


B: Sadly, Sady Doyle's critique is more ad hominem than economic. I haven't read superfreakonomics yet but the analysis of prostitution in the original freakonomics gave some really good insights, including a remarkably elastic supply curve for street prostitutes in Hyde Park Chicago


A: Sady Doyle had a lot to say about Levitt and Dubner's method (or lack thereof) and the implicit assumptions about women as set out in the passage on prostitution that's been published in the news. Both are - not to put too fine a point on it or anything - rubbish. These are vital features of the excerpt and explaining how they are lacking is not "ad hominem".


C: I have to say also agree with B that Sady Doyle's analysis is hardly adequate in pointing out the flaws you mention. I found her writing off-puttingly rabid and rant-like. Entertaining enough for dinner conversation but certainly not the sort of balanced, dispassionate writing anyone on this list, past or present, should be emulating.


A: And I find Levitt and Dubner's writing off-puttingly trite, reductive and misogynist - not "balanced" or "dispassionate" but merely expressing disdain for women and girls in tones of perfect civility, much as colonialists might once have talked about the higher purposes of their civilising mission or Victorians might have spoken of the influence of the womb in producing hysteria and vapours in women, all without once putting in an impolite word.

I wish trite, reductive misogyny had no place on this list or in formal education too. We could make tone arguments all day, with equal merits on both sides (honestly, Levitt and Dubner's talk about the "ideal wife" being someone who gives in to all whims - essentially idealising rape, by the way, since the implication is that women who sometimes say no are falling short of what female life partners ought to be there for - and you're saying Doyle is the inappropriate one?). Quite aside from tone, Doyle makes a series of substantive points (failure to engage with the specificity of Sheena's circumstances, failure to consider structural factors like poverty, obvious misogyny in language etc.)


Me: I found [the article and the working paper it was partly based on] very interesting, and sensational only when compared with typical academic writing - surely to tell a tale in an un-boring manner is not a bad thing for a book.

Sure, prostitution involves a lot of other factors, but what Levitt is doing is very familiar to economists. It's called modelling. You take the essential elements of the situation, strip away extraneous elements and look what happens when you tweak the parameters you're interested in. Except that here, the "models" happen to be people.

Face it, if we substituted "wall painting" for "prostitution", no one would be hysterically accusing Levitt of objectifying painters - even though the underlying principles, assumptions and analyses remain unchanged.

Similarly, take an insurance company trying to find the optimum level of deductibles (or excess, for those readers still loyal to the Queen). For those not inducted into the Wonderful World of Insurance yet, this is how much of whatever you lost you have to pay for before the insurance company comes in and pays for the rest. So if my $2,000 laptop is insured has a $400 deductible, if I lose it I only get $1,600 back. The purpose of deductibles to reduce moral hazard and outright cheating, but no one accuses the insurance company of assuming that all its customers are cheats, frauds, careless tossers etc.

The fuss and hoopla that arise when economics is applied to non-traditional situations remind me of the reaction to another controversial theory about a century ago (which remains controversial in some quarters today) - the Theory of Evolution.

People said that it was degrading to humans, irreligious and outrageous, and that it assumed that humans were no better than animals - just because they did not like the theory and its implications.

Yet, just because you do not like a theory does not mean that the theory is not true - or that the theory is horrible, evil, misguided etc. Just because evolution lead to eugenics and the Holocaust does not mean that it is a bad or wrong theory, or that it cannot or should not be applied to humans.

Theories involving human behavior do not tell us how to behave - they tell us why we behave in certain ways. To explain is not to justify, and just because something happens does not mean that it is right (this is the moralistic fallacy). In some sense, this is kind of like the difference between positive and normative economics.

Human interaction is more than market interaction - but one cannot deny that market forces are at work.

Gary Becker has used economics to analyse racial discrimination, crime, family organization, and drug addiction - that does not mean that he has a cynical view of human behavior.

Just because you draw supply and demand curves to analyse the quantity of labour which a wife supplies if you vary the wage she could get working outside and other factors (e.g. whether she has a vacuum cleaner) does not mean that you view women as sources of free labour.

Once you get emotional, you are liable to miss all sorts of subtleties (or even major points).

Take for example Levitt's previous work on how the legalisation of abortion resulted in the declining crime rate in the US in the 1990s. A few people criticised his statistics but most people started going on about how he was saying that abortion was a means of crime control, which was really missing the point (and indeed was something he explicitly disclaimed). A more important (not to mention relevant) implication of that paper was that giving poor and single mothers support in raising their kids would lead to better life outcomes for their kids (as well as lower crime rates).

As an aside, anti-witch hysteria in the Middle Ages is usually explained by superstition, misogyny and religious factors. Yet, I read a paper which correlated cold weather (and thus bad harvests) with the number of witch trials. This does not mean that economic realities were solely responsible for anti-witch hysteria (that's a very Marxist interpretation) but it does suggest that ignoring the economic factors to flog your favourite ideological horse risks missing something important.

I would love to see more of such work in the future - as Levitt and Venkatesh note, research in this field is scarce - but am sure that the hysteria and sensitivity from some quarters cannot help but diminish our understanding of such a subject.

This is a pity as, for example, I'm sure the Chicago Police Department (as well as their watchdogs) needed to know that "for prostitutes who do not work with pimps... roughly three percent of all their tricks are freebies given to police".

Even those who are opposed to prostitution would benefit from such research; Levitt and Venkatesh find that the street prostitutes in Chicago earn four times as much as prostitutes than in their outside jobs - one wishing to reduce prostitution would thus look into making the alternative jobs pay better relative to prostitution (or, if a Singaporean policymaker were in charge, he would recommend retraining - or at least moving up the value chain, which we seem to see happening in Singapore).

Finally, let me end off with a quote from the feminist author Angela Carter:

"The whore is despised by the hypocritical world because she has made a realistic assessment of her assets and does not have to rely on fraud to make a living. In an area of human relations where fraud is regular practice between the sexes, her honesty is regarded with a mocking wonder."

PS: For those who don't know, prostitution is legal in Singapore


A: Nobody on this list, that I can see, is objecting to the application of economic analysis to prostitution. Gabriel is addressing a straw person. The objections from Sady Doyle which I have shared related specifically to the piece in The Times, which is the excerpt from the Superfreakonomics book. It does not relate to the draft academic paper...

- Nothing in the draft paper remedies the failure to investigate why LaSheena (I apologise for spelling her name wrong earlier) expresses a dislike of men. The fact that the academic paper found violence and sexual assault to be a common part of the street sex worker experience in fact makes it even more disturbing that the authors did not see fit to point out in the Times piece that those might be pretty good reasons why someone in LaSheena's position would express the sentiments she does.

- Moreover, nothing in the draft paper supports Levitt and Dubner's implication that LaSheena's attitude is (rather than quite probably a reasonable response to being frequently beaten and raped) some kind of fault on her part justifying her low wages by comparison to Allie's wonderful sex-loving nature. (By the by, I have to wonder about the idea that enjoying sex translates into enjoying prostitution. Enjoyable sex frequently requires one's partner to show some skill and make a positive effort. In prostitution one is paid to cater to the preferences of the client. There is a tension here, which is not to say some clients might not want to see the sex worker express enjoyment, but when that conflicts with their own enjoyment? I think we can guess the customer's wishes are almost certainly prioritised.)

- Nothing in the research, moreover, supports Levitt and Dubner's conclusion that it is somehow surprising that more women don't choose sex work. The academic paper itself points out that once you factor in attendant personal risks, the wage from sex work is not particularly high. So their own work indicates there is no basis for the very same conclusion they push.

- Finally, nothing in the research justifies the claim that, as Doyle points out, consensual non-paid sex is always and everywhere the same or even a comparable experience to paid sex. And nothing in the research justifies the claim that having no preferences of your own and acceding to every whim of the client/husband and never requiring any contribution or participation to the household (e.g. asking him to take out the trash) is the behaviour of the "ideal wife". Not only are these claims not backed up by any evidence, it's also virtually impossible to see how an economic analysis could lead to them. They are, funnily enough, ideological statements, just as much as objections to them are. Far from being a reasoned, evidence-led investigation into a fraught controversial area, the Levitt and Dubner chapter excerpted into the Times is simply another heap of prejudice, which makes one wonder how many other unexamined pre-theoretical assumptions are being imported into all the other allegedly economic analysis the authors conduct.


B: The working paper I've provided provides 1) support for the portion of the chapter in freakonomics that describes the conditions of street level prostitutes in Chicago and hence 2) rebukes Sady Doyle's accusation that Levitt and Dubner were not aware/failed to question LaSheena's circumstances (and by the way, their choice of the name LaSheena already alludes to her race).

Actually I don't think that Gabriel isn't addressing a straw person (and thank you Gabriel for providing your arguments). It seems to both Gabriel and me that the prostitution chapter in freakonomics isn't as prejudiced nor filled with misogyny as A mentioned. I think this contention has merely arisen because we have drawn different conclusions from the chapter. Where Gabriel and I see objective economic arguments relating to a commodity (in this case, sex), A sees the commodification of women. We're essentially looking at the same thing from two different angles.

Also, Sady Doyle and A argue that unpaid sex and paid sex are in essence, different goods. I wouldn't dare differ. However, the remarkably elastic supply of prostitutes at the extensive margin (from the working paper) does suggest a surprisingly small premium for paid sex amongst women in that area in Chicago. And A/Sady's point that they do so out of poverty does not hold weight, since the working paper used the 4th of July as a regression instrument (i.e. these women only became prostitutes at the extensive margin during that period of higher demand).

I would encourage everyone to read both Sady Doyle's commentary as well as the excerpt again. I think Sady/ A and many others have drawn a couple of inaccurate conclusions about the excerpt. In particular, they claim that freakonomics states that one of the reasons for LaSheena's lack of success is the fact that she hates being a prostitute. Somehow I think the excerpt never really made that causal claim.

Also, I would recommend that we not blame Levitt or Dubner for the use of the prejudiced term "ideal wife". I have personally met the elite prostitute at the centre of this argument (disclaimer: not because I was soliciting her services but merely as a student in Levitt's undergraduate class on crime), and the "ideal wife" term was brought up many a time by the prostitute herself to describe that service that she was providing. In fact, the entire excerpt of freakonomics could have just been a transcript of her two hour lecture that she gave.

That said, I do concede that prejudiced terms like an "ideal wife" ought not to make their way into economic commentary and I definitely do not agree with the book's definition of the ideal wife: "beautiful, attentive, smart, laughing at your jokes and satisfying your lust." But let's move on from this, and talk about the economics of freakonomics.


A: I don't think your first paragraph is accurate at all. The draft paper provides support for the idea that Levitt and Dubner know that many prostitutes experience battery and rape as part of their working conditions, as well as serious threats to their health and well-being - but that despite this knowledge of a dozen assaults a year for most prostitutes, regular rape at the hands of policemen (there is no other way to describe these "freebies" other than using the threat of potential arrest to coerce sex, i.e. rape) and frequent other sexual violence, they staunchly refuse to allude to these facts when describing LaSheena for the purposes of the book. Instead they caricature her as someone who "dislikes men" and then set up this comparison with Allie, whose shines with positivity! I'm not sure which is worse, their apparent ignorance from the Times piece alone or their wilful refusal to mention these extraordinarily salient facts when they represent LaSheena for popular consumption. What you point out is hardly a vindication.

The paper also establishes that they know pimps take a large cut of the money that johns pay for sex work, and yet Levitt and Dubner claim without qualification that this a "labour market" that women have "dominated". Well, sure, prostitution is "dominated by women" in the same way that cotton in the time of slavery in the American South was "dominated by blacks", in that they are the numerical majority at the front line. By the same token, lots of developing country labour is "dominated by children". But who's making the sigificant money out of it, while not running the major bodily risks or doing the main work?

And no, I repeat, I don't think consensual sex is the same as paid sex, and your talk about margins and the 4th of July doesn't change the fact that Levitt and Dubner explicitly claim it is. By talking about the sale of sex in a way which reproduces their inability to conceive that women might have sex because women enjoy having sex, you are failing to understand the critique being made. Do you consider spontaneously initiated hugs - to show sympathy or affection - a "good" which can be "sold"? Could the "value" that someone derived from being hugged by a friend be replicated if they paid someone to hug them? Or is the fact that they demonstrate authentic emotion - affection, sympathy, etc. - part of the whole point of the interaction for the people involved? There are many instances of mutually desired sex which operate in the same way as hugging, in that authentic mutual desire is a large part of the point of the experience for both people (and before anyone accuses me of naivete, I am not talking about Twue Fowevver Wuv, just genuine mutual **desire** to **have sex**), so that they and paid sex are in no way substitutes for each other, and it is disingenuous and nasty - man-hating as much as woman-hating - for Levitt and Dubner to posit otherwise.

The claim that the term "ideal wife" comes from Allie doesn't make it any better. It's misogynist whomever it comes from. Levitt and Dubner reproduce it uncritically - therefore they promote its misogynist assumptions without bothering to even note them.

And no, I don't see any reason to "move on" from Levitt and Dubner's misogyny. We are talking about an industry which their own research shows to be rife with battery and sexual violence. You may find it amusing, entertaining, almost as important as analysing football penalties even, to perform mental Lego tricks off the back of (primarily) poor women who are regularly beaten and raped, without taking into account the way dehumanising attitudes towards women and girls in general are part of the societal context which results in their being so treated. I do not share any interest in doing so.


D: Whether it is woman or man hating is beyond me. That particular judgment does not play a role in economics. The fact of the matter (sadly or no) is that it is quite plausible (i'm convinced at least) that the decline in the demand for prostitutes is explained (at least partially) by the availability of consensual sex as a substitute (and a superior one at that, and without an explicit monetary price).


A: I was thinking about precisely this issue further and I think again this points to the limits of economic analysis in addressing this for the following reason. You are arguing that consensual sex of the variety I described - which, like a hug, derives its value precisely from being an authentic expression of an autonomous emotion offered by an equal - and paid sex are imperfect substitutes. I would argue on the other hand that:

- Paid sex is not in any way a substitute, perfect or imperfect, for this experience of mutual desire. People who value consensual sex of the hug-like variety I described would get absolutely none of the relevant value from paid sex. What it is a substitute for is masturbation, or rapelike sex (e.g. where one partner is badgered into the sex, or frightened into it).

- The increase in the so-called "availability", as well as the human ability to imagine and the desire for, hug-like consensual sex is rooted in and parallels precisely advances in women's liberation and the recognition of women as autonomous sexual beings. This was to a very large extent mostly impossible for most people until women could be conceived of in any way as equals.

- The same is true of marriage. It's true that in certain classes and certain societies - certainly many of the literate English-speaking circles within which the language we use to talk about sex and marriage developed - "pandering to a man's every whim" and "ideal wife" were synonymous. In Singapore (as the No To Rape campaign illustrates) we are still struggling with redefining ideas of marriage, with understanding it as a partnership of equals, and with understanding the gulf between rapelike sex and genuinely, authentically mutually desired sex. When Levitt and Dubner talk about selling "the wife experience" that allegedly all straight men want, they are making certain implicit assumptions about the nature of marriages that exist, the nature of marriages to which women and men both aspire, and how either of those things can be translated into marketable services.

So when people throw around words like "sex" or "wife" and statements about "men wanting sex" or "ideal wife" they are including all kinds of implicit assumptions about the type of "sex" or "wife" concerned, the political backdrop against which these conceptions of sex can be formed, the attitudes of the men towards women etc.

In other words - and this is vital - it is not possible to even define the good concerned with here, or talk about substitutes and markets, without, as Mr S pointed out, venturing into sexual politics.

This is why, again, Levitt and Dubner's Superfreakonomics must be exposed as shallow. Because they make all kinds of statements of sexual politics all over it (e.g. how puzzling that more women don't want to be prostitutes! Here's a woman who likes sex and men, and another who doesn't! Here's a woman who is an ideal wife!) Their economic analysis on this topic cannot be clear and meaningful unless their analysis of sexual politics is clear and meaningful - and that it most certainly is not, since they are simply stating conclusions without even being aware, it would appear, that they are taking political positions. When they talk about more consensual sex being available for "free", they fail to understand that what is on "offer" here for "free" is a completely different thing of value, which cannot be made into a commodity, from what used to be conceivable let alone available before.

... Their failure to engage with any of these ideas just shows how shallow the analysis is.


E: I agree with A that there is a difference between hug-like sex and the kind of sex that D described, a one-night fling, no strings attached and no emotional attachment kind of sex. However, since there are still people who engage prostitutes for paid sex, it is the latter kind of sex that they demand and sex is, unfortunately, reduced to a one-dimensional commodity. This can quite plausibly be substituted by casual consensual sex, which Levitt and Dubner argues, is threatening the market for the provision of the latter kind of sex. However, it cannot be simply argued that "rather than a demand being fulfilled for free, the demand curve itself is transformed by a decrease in demand". The spread of STDs and abortion rates are all reasonable indicators of the prevalence of casual sex (the latter kind). It is common knowledge that STDs are becoming more prevalent and abortion rates are rising in many countries such as Singapore. To explain all that to be the consequence of an increase in frequency of hug-like sex with different parties seems to be rather far-fetched, hence I'm not sure whether the market has changed as drastically as you have made it out to be. With regards to their failure to mention the unfortunate circumstances of LaSheena (especially the sexual assaults and physical abuse that she is subjected to), I find that to be slightly irrelevant to the subject matter that Levitt and Dubner is trying to bring up. The question that they attempt to answer, is why Allie is paid so well while LaSheena suffers from a low wage even though both seemingly offer similar services. With specific regards to the abuse that LaSheena may have suffered, accounting for them in the book does not help in whatever superficial analysis that they are trying to make. To put it bluntly, to assume that there is a real need to mention such abuses (that this is such an important pillar in their analysis) will imply that how much abuse suffered is part of the model that helps us predict the amount that prostitutes are paid. This link, I am sure, is egregious. Hence, Sady's frequent use of the "rape" and "abuse" only make her writing emotionally-charged. Perhaps Levitt and Dubner did not find the need to include these details as they may find it to be more appropriate to be mentioned in books that raise awareness of the plight of prostitutes rather than freakonomics.

The analysis that Dubner and Levitt made is simple. Once it has been established that there is a fall in demand due to increase in substitutes, Allie decides to carry out a form of product differentiation. She becomes an escort, offering personalised services and where the market may have many LaSheenas, there is only one Allie. She is able to restrict supply and make demand price inelastic, earning much more than her counterpart. (All standard A level Economics material) In Singapore's context, this will be equivalent to "job re-design". The expression used by Dubner and Levitt may have been misleading in the sense that they described LaSheena as not liking men, a description or characterisation which I think is unneccessary. We do not know why LaSheena did not do the same, in which case, taking into account other circumstances such as poverty, education and opportuities will be relevant. However, that does not discredit whatever basic economic analysis that they have made.


F: To say that a given set of preferences is misogynistic does not mean that they do not exist. The binary division of people into one group that values only consensual sex and another that values sex of the rapelike/paid variety is as much of a simplification as the assumption that paid sex and consensual sex are (imperfect) substitutes. Given plausible arguments on both sides, the degree of substitutability is a purely empirical issue. D, B and I are of the opinion that, at least on the margin, there are (possibly misogynistic) individuals for whom there is a degree of substitutability between paid and consensual sex. A argues that said individuals cannot exist a priori. A statistical analysis to decide which assumption is more applicable is not difficult to conceive of: get data on individuals who pay for sex and regress the number of times they visit prostitutes on the incidence of consensual sex, controlling for other independent variables such as exogenous price shocks. Levitt and Dubner do not provide said analysis, but it would certainly be interesting to see if such work has been done (or is going to be).

Furthermore, just because an argument employs sexist assumptions does not mean it is devoid of truth. Regardless of whether their ignorance is blissful or willful, I disagree that it is impossible to provide a clear and meaningful analysis of prostitution without providing a clear and meaningful discussion of sexual politics. As Gabriel mentioned, the role of the social scientist is to increase clarity of analysis by building models that strip away some of the richness of the available narrative. Levitt and Dubner's approach to analysing prostitution isn't rubbish just because it fails to address salient points like race and poverty (though B rightly points out that empirical evidence suggests that poverty per se cannot explain prostitution, at least on the extensive margin). Rather, given the tradeoff between clarity and complexity, by ignoring said issues they focus on the entrepreneurial, rent-earning aspects of being a call-girl versus street-walking. This may be offensive, but since it is unclear to me why undiscussed factors might be correlated with the ones discussed in a distortionary fashion, it does not make their framework less valid.

This raises the wider question of whether the utilisation of misogynistic assumptions necessarily furthers misogynistic views. Just like how labour economists who do not discuss the inner struggles of the unemployed aren't necessarily furthering elitist views, I do not believe that Messrs Levitt and Dubner are explicitly or implicitly furthering a sexist agenda. It is interesting that A mentions the slave trade: Fogel and Engerman (1974) for instance find evidence to suggest that slaves enjoyed better nutrition than their free counterparts because owners sought to optimise production. However, no one - certainly not Fogel or Engerman - would suggest that slavery was a good thing. They were merely illustrating a point on the slave economy.

Back to prostitution and sexism: while I can certainly see the danger, I think there is still a place for the assumptions that Levitt and Dubner employ. Social scientists seek to prescribe solutions to specific problems. If our objective is to improve welfare, for instance, then the relevant prescriptions that their analysis (yes, I do think it is deserving of the term) suggests are the provision of education and capital to streetwalkers as well as the partial legalisation of prostitution to eliminate the inefficient rents that callgirls are earning. If, on the other hand, our objective is to work towards a gender-blind world, then A's objections to their language and assumptions apply. Sure, some might believe the microeconomic analysis of the former adversely affect the achievement of the latter. However, to impose a separate objective function on a piece of research that explicitly doesn't seek to address certain concerns strikes me as inappropriate.


G: I do not have anything more of great value to add to the role of assumptions in economics or in any social science. I think as far as social-scientific analysis goes, the point A might be - or, should be - making is that Levitt and Dubner's analysis is simply lacking in analytical rigour for having taken so many sexual assumptions for granted and failing to make explicit mention of them. I also agree very much with the argument that economic analysis based on questionable assumptions cannot be meaningful.

But with all due respect, I would like to point out that on the tangential topic (well, this is after all a group on Economics, which really does stop at assumptions in each of its models) of whether hug-like sex really is or should be regarded as different from 'instrumental' sex, surely it is the subjective perceptions of the individual male and female participants that determine whether the two varieties really are the same. So insisting that they are really different simply talks past anyone whom we might want to accuse of unfairly assuming that they are interchangeable.

And, as D has said, it is not as if they do not have good reason to make this assumption, in the same way that we do have good reason to suppose that the labour of a housewife is instrumentally substitutable for the labour of a hired domestic worker, even though they are clearly not the same.

Next, on the plausibility of the assumption that "they really can be considered as the same thing", which is a much stronger claim than their being substitutes, consider studies such as this, which are a dime a dozen in newspapers and academic circles: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/16/sex-object-photograph. [no, it does not contain photographs of 'sex objects' as the name might suggest] What I am trying to say here is nothing more than that the possibility that some men really do not see a difference in the two types of sex is indeed there, whether it is offensive or not.

Then there is the issue of Allie. It does not help that Allie-type stereotypes are propagated on a regular basis by articles such as this one from today's Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/15/belle-de-jour-blogger-prostitute. They are probably made out my the media to appear far more common than they actually are. But it is clearly a fact that such people can exist, as in Levitt and Dubner's assumptions. I am personally inclined to think they do.

For all these factual reasons, I straightforwardly think that Levitt and Dubner should not be criticised as shallow. Because for all the sexual-political questions that may be thrown up about the definition of the good they are talking about, they simply have a point, because sex of all kinds have at least one thing in common: they are all sex. These two authors sorely lack in analytical rigour in these aspects, and perhaps their assumptions should have and could have been less simplistic and more nuanced. But I don't think attacking their assumptions, especially as shallow (how sophisticated/deep-delving should an economist's assumptions be?) is the right way to go about exposing their most serious flaws. Neither is justifying their assumptions the point of their economic analysis.

If we cannot even agree on what the word 'sex' means - much less accept narratives of a changing conception of sex (whose conceptions, and how could anyone know anyway?) - then it is an essentially contested concept that therefore does not belong on this forum as a central topic of interest.


Me: Before F, E and G weighed in, this thread seemed to be in danger of lurching dangerously off-topic. I shall endeavour to similarly relate what I say back to Economics as far as possible.

I do think that it can be dangerous to draw general conclusions from a small sample size (in this case, 2 case studies) but we should bear in mind that Levitt and Dubner are writing a book - not an academic paper. They are using economic concepts to illustrate and examine phenomena from everyday life. And indeed, in the chapter we can see that they talk about the elasticity of labour supply, repackaging of goods, price discrimination, substitute goods etc. I still venture that if they had been talking about other, less sensitive topics, people would have ignored the factors they left out. More research is, of course, needed - but then, that is the conclusion of 99% of scientific, economic and psychological papers (i.e. those which look at empirical data instead of working from a priori conclusions).

I notice also that all the presumably positive things that Levitt and Dubner say - that women have been historically worse off, that women's lib has improved the lot of the fairer sex a lot, that women still get paid less than men and that street prostitutes are not paid well - are ignored.

Levitt and Dubner's thesis here is not that more women should be street level prostitutes - who are not paid well, suffer abuse etc, but that more women (including street level prostitutes) should be high class social escorts - who are paid much better. From what I have read of the higher end of this profession, entry and exit are uncoerced and working conditions are quite good. And yes the supply of labour is elastic - when the IMF and World Bank came around to Singapore, escort agencies upped their recruitment (http://www.lothlorien.sg/index.php?topic=288.0;wap2)

A claims that paid and unpaid sex are not substitutable, but it is no surprise that when the number of women in the population is low relative to that of men, prostitution flourishes. This explains why army camps in the past always had camp followers, Dubai was a hotbed of prostitution (at least during the boom: http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/58509) and early Singapore, which had many male immigrants, was likewise "one of the centers of the sex industry in Asia" (http://www.onlinewomeninpolitics.org/NewsFolder_OBJuly16/SingaporesJapaneseProstitute.doc). More examples of a high male:female ratio resulting in more prostitution are discussed in Edlund and Korn's A Theory of Prostitution (http://the-idea-shop.com/papers/prostitution.pdf; which also has a mathematical model to explain prostitution). To say that this means that when the gender ratio equalises the men then engage in "masturbation, or rapelike sex" in lieu of patronising prostitutes is frankly a bizarre conclusion, not to mention a misandristic one.

I'm sure that many people do not view paid-for sex as a substitute for the "free" sort, but we cannot deny that for many others, it is and for even more, the coefficient of substitution is low but non-negligible. In simple English, some people happily patronise prostitutes, and others only visit if they are not getting any at all.

In related news, another post on the Comment is Free column:

Selling sex with a smile
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/oct/28/sex-work-superfreakonomics

"Sex is like crushed red pepper: guaranteed to add heat and spice to recipes that would otherwise be as bland and boring as unflavoured farina. Consider this dull economic dictum: "Service workers who enjoy their jobs generate more enthusiastic (and lucrative) customer response than workers with a bad attitude."

How obvious! A rude, unfriendly waiter gets smaller tips from diners. Even writers like me wouldn't land decent commissions if our every pitch to an editor carried the undertone "I hate you, Guardian. I loathe writing for you, and I'd never do it if I didn't have to support three kids and a cocaine habit."

No one would deny that "attitude matters" regarding waiters or writers, but observing that a sad and desperate prostitute makes less money than a happy, confident one – as authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner do in their new tome Superfreakonomics – generates a controversy that would never exist without that peppery red sex addition spicing up the farina."


A: I stand by my statement that the failure to engage sexual politics makes the Times piece extraordinarily weak as a piece of analysis of any kind, economic or otherwise...

Despite the fact that others have disclaimed the Levitt and Dubner divide between Good Prostitute and Bad Prostitute and claimed that the Times piece does not promote it at all, Gabriel at least in his last post has picked up on, and enthusiastically reproduced, the message that LaSheena's poverty is her fault for not being a good little automaton who sexually services men with a smile even though battery and rape of women in her position is common. So I disagree that Levitt and Dubner are "just" reporting on the mechanics of the situation in the same way as the Fogel and Engerman paper is claimed to do - by choosing to write the Superfreakonomics piece, which is not a dispassionate analysis but a supposed "insight" into prostitution which reproduces a lot of social and political observations, Levitt and Dubner are positioning themselves as social comment supposedly backed by the authority of economic insight. And it's lousy social comment.