Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [12]
Converted into today’s dollars, the $6-per-week shopgirl had an annual salary of only $6,500. The same woman who took up prostitution at $25 a week earned the modern equivalent of more than $25,000 a year. But the Vice Commission acknowledged that $25 per week was at the very low end of what Chicago prostitutes earned. A woman working in a “dollar house” (some brothels charged as little as 50 cents; others charged $5 or $10) took home an average weekly salary of $70, or the modern equivalent of about $76,000 annually.
At the heart of the Levee, the South Side neighborhood that housed block after block of brothels, stood the Everleigh Club, which the Vice Commission described as “the most famous and luxurious house of prostitution in the country.” Its customers included business titans, politicians, athletes, entertainers, and even a few anti-prostitution crusaders. The Everleigh’s prostitutes, known as “butterfly girls,” were not only attractive, hygienic, and trustworthy, but also good conversationalists who could cite classical poetry if that’s what floated a particular gentleman’s boat. In the book Sin in the Second City, Karen Abbott reports that the Everleigh also offered sexual delicacies that weren’t available elsewhere—“French” style, for instance, commonly known today as oral sex.
In an age when a nice dinner cost about $12 in today’s currency, the Everleigh’s customers were willing to pay the equivalent of $250 just to get into the club and $370 for a bottle of champagne. Relatively speaking, the sex was pretty cheap: about $1,250.
Ada and Minna Everleigh, the sisters who ran the brothel, guarded their assets carefully. Butterflies were provided with a healthful diet, excellent medical care, a well-rounded education, and the best wage going: as much as $400 a week, or the modern equivalent of about $430,000 a year.
To be sure, an Everleigh butterfly’s wages were off the charts. But why did even a typical Chicago prostitute one hundred years ago earn so much money?
The best answer is that wages are determined in large part by the laws of supply and demand, which are often more powerful than laws made by legislators.
In the United States especially, politics and economics don’t mix well. Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.
When prostitution was criminalized in the United States, most of the policing energy was directed at the prostitutes rather than their customers. This is pretty typical. As with other illicit markets—think about drug dealing or black-market guns—most governments prefer to punish the people who are supplying the goods and services rather than the people who are consuming them.
But when you lock up a supplier, a scarcity is created that inevitably drives the price higher, and that entices more suppliers to enter the market. The U.S. “war on drugs” has been relatively ineffective precisely because it focuses on sellers and not buyers. While drug buyers obviously outnumber drug sellers, more than 90 percent of all prison time for drug convictions is served by dealers.
Why doesn’t the public support punishing users? It may seem unfair to punish the little guy, the user, when he can’t help himself from partaking in vice. The suppliers, meanwhile, are much easier to demonize.
But if a government really wanted to crack down on illicit goods and services, it would go after the people who demand them. If, for instance, men convicted of hiring a prostitute were sentenced to castration, the market would contract in a hurry.
In Chicago some one hundred years ago, the risk of punishment fell almost entirely on the prostitute. Besides the constant threat of arrest, there was also the deep social stigma of prostitution. Perhaps the greatest penalty was that a woman who worked as a prostitute would never be able to find a suitable husband. Combine these factors and you can see that a prostitute’s wages had to be high to entice enough women to satisfy