
How a call girl can earn far more by actually working far less - Flemlord
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article6879237.ece
======
aresant
Disclaimer: 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
_is a soul crushing business for 99/100 prostitutes_

How is that conclusion much better than the one you're attacking?

~~~
aresant
Fair 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://kiss951.radio.com/2010/04/29/seven-statistics-
about-p...](http://kiss951.radio.com/2010/04/29/seven-statistics-about-
prostitutes/)

[http://womensissues.about.com/od/rapesexualassault/a/Wuornos...](http://womensissues.about.com/od/rapesexualassault/a/Wuornos.htm)

~~~
dotcoma
I think high-level and low-level prostitution are two almost completely
different businesses.

~~~
yardie
Yes, 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
Totally different clientele.

Ask this lady <http://www.realprincessdiaries.com/>

~~~
jacquesm
If you're at work you probably don't want to click that link.

~~~
trustfundbaby
Yeah ... sorry guys, NSFW.

------
lionhearted
Problems 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>

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
> 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.

~~~
zaidf
Funny. An assistant at my Dad's work figured she was paying almost her salary
in babysitting costs and other expenses for things she could do herself if she
had time. So she quit.

My dad calls it the pay-your-neighbor-so-he-can-pay-his-neighbor phenomenon.
Uncle Sam makes the most money in that relationship. He makes nothing when you
babysit your own kid; he makes plenty when you hire someone to do the same
thing(and someone hires you to do their thing).

~~~
dennisgorelik
So high taxes make people more likely to maintain traditional family (husband
works and wife runs the household).

~~~
aswanson
Or hold back on having children, or lowering the number of children that they
have.

~~~
jacquesm
Possibly lowering that number all the way down to 0.

------
ab9
Allie 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
The 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
Thanks, 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.

------
dannyr
This 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
I 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
I 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.

------
maxklein
I'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.

~~~
Locke1689
I'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).

------
tianaco
"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
> 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
I 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.

------
dkarl
The 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.

------
dublinclontarf
Hmmmf, $500 is a little less than what I get for one month full time as an
English teacher :-/

~~~
roel_v
Well I guess that the comparison is meaningless with someone who lives in a
2nd tier Chinese city...

~~~
dublinclontarf
It's got me thinking on changing professions.

~~~
crpatino
You 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).

~~~
dublinclontarf
Changing professions doesn't mean into prostitution. I'm not too sure of the
demand here of balding, slightly overweight pale western men.

------
crazydiamond
very long-winded.

essentially, she charged more and became a high-end sex worker.

------
varjag
I wonder how she does her taxes.

~~~
gaius
Ha 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
Then if it's legal, why the implicit threat of police raid is in the article?

~~~
gaius
IANAL 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
"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
[citation needed]

~~~
erikstarck
I 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-kvinn...](http://nyheter24.se/nyheter/utrikes/160704-fler-man-an-kvinnor-
saljer-sex)

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=58...](http://kilden.forskningsradet.no/publikasjon/vis.html?tid=58067)

~~~
philwelch
You 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.

------
georgecmu
I posted a critical view of sentiments expressed in this article a while back:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1573319>

~~~
mturmon
Useful 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
But 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.

------
rokhayakebe
$300/hour? That is one of the highest paying job i ever heard of.

~~~
danilocampos
Better 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
There 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
I 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
If you can bill $craploads per hour, why work 50-60 hours a week? I'd work 30.
Maybe 20.

~~~
philwelch
Yes, this is what economists call the "backwards-bending supply curve for
labor". Turns out if you pay people craploads per hour, you get _fewer_ hours
out of them, not more. This is unlike every other supply curve--if you pay
$1,000 per hour of labor you get less labor than if you pay $100 per hour of
labor, but if you pay $1,000 per gross of self-sealing stem bolts you get way,
way, way more self-sealing stem bolts than if you pay $100 per gross of self-
sealing stem bolts.

The worst you get from ordinary supply curves is diminishing returns. If you
paid $1,000,000 per bushel of apples, well, you're just throwing away money--
I'm sure we'd max out the earth's apple-growing capacity well before $500,000
per bushel. Labor's the only supply curve that actually bends back.

------
lotusleaf1987
The best part is at the end when the monkey pays another monkey for sex.

~~~
daniel-cussen
I think that's part of the origin of human evolution (this started happening
after women started having hidden estrus).

~~~
ithkuil
or 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.

------
c00p3r
It is all about 'to find a [micro] niche', using Internet or other
'connections'. ^_^

