Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [13]
The biggest money, of course, was taken home by the women at the top of the prostitution pyramid. By the time the Everleigh Club was shut down—the Chicago Vice Commission finally got its way—Ada and Minna Everleigh had accumulated, in today’s currency, about $22 million.
The mansion that housed the Everleigh Club is long gone. So is the entire Levee district. The very street grid where the Everleigh stood was wiped away in the 1960s, replaced by a high-rise housing project.
But this is still the South Side of Chicago and prostitutes still work there—like LaSheena, in the black-and-red tracksuit—although you can be pretty sure they won’t be quoting you any Greek poetry.
LaSheena is one of the many street prostitutes Sudhir Venkatesh has gotten to know lately. Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University in New York, spent his grad-school years in Chicago and still returns there regularly for research.
When he first arrived, he was a naïve, sheltered, Grateful Dead–loving kid who’d grown up in laid-back California, eager to take the temperature of an intense town where race—particularly black and white—played out with great zeal. Being neither black nor white (he was born in India) worked in Venkatesh’s favor, letting him slip behind the battle lines of both academia (which was overwhelmingly white) and the South Side ghettos (which were overwhelmingly black). Before long, he had embedded himself with a street gang that practically ran the neighborhood and made most of its money by selling crack cocaine. (Yes, it was Venkatesh’s research that figured prominently in the Freakonomics chapter about drug dealers, and yes, we are back now for a second helping.) Along the way, he became an authority on the neighborhood’s underground economy, and when he was done with the drug dealers he moved on to the prostitutes.
But an interview or two with a woman like LaSheena can reveal only so much. Anyone who wants to really understand the prostitution market needs to accumulate some real data.
That’s easier said than done. Because of the illicit nature of the activity, standard data sources (think of census forms or tax rolls) are no help. Even when prostitutes have been surveyed directly in previous studies, the interviews are often conducted long after the fact and by the kind of agency (a drug-rehab center, for instance, or a church shelter) that doesn’t necessarily elicit impartial results.
Moreover, earlier research has shown that when people are surveyed about stigmatizing behavior, they either downplay or exaggerate their participation, depending on what’s at stake or who is asking.
Consider the Mexican welfare program Oportunidades. To get aid, applicants have to itemize their personal possessions and household goods. Once an applicant is accepted, a caseworker visits his home and learns whether the applicant was telling the truth.
César Martinelli and Susan W. Parker, two economists who analyzed the data from more than 100,000 Oportunidades clients, found that applicants routinely underreported certain items, including cars, trucks, video recorders, satellite TVs, and washing machines. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. People hoping to get welfare benefits have an incentive to make it sound like they are poorer than they truly are. But as Martinelli and Parker discovered, applicants overreported other items: indoor plumbing, running water, a gas stove, and a concrete floor. Why on earth would welfare applicants say they had these essentials when they didn’t?
Martinelli and Parker attribute it to embarrassment. Even people who are poor enough to need welfare apparently don’t want to admit to a welfare clerk that they have a dirt floor or live without a toilet.
Venkatesh, knowing that traditional survey methods don’t necessarily produce reliable results for a sensitive topic like prostitution, tried something different: real-time, on-the-spot data collection. He hired trackers to stand on street corners or sit in brothels with the prostitutes, directly observing some facets of their transactions