Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [15]
So premarital sex emerged as a viable substitute for prostitution. And as the demand for paid sex decreased, so too did the wage of the people who provide it.
If prostitution were a typical industry, it might have hired lobbyists to fight against the encroachment of premarital sex. They would have pushed to have premarital sex criminalized or, at the very least, heavily taxed. When the steelmakers and sugar producers of America began to feel the heat of competition—in the form of cheaper goods from Mexico, China, or Brazil—they got the federal government to impose tariffs that protected their homegrown products.
Such protectionist tendencies are nothing new. More than 150 years ago, the French economist Frédéric Bastiat wrote “The Candlemakers’ Petition,” said to represent the interests of “the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, Candlesticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers” as well as “the Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally Everything Connected with Lighting.”
These industries, Bastiat complained, “are suffering from the ruinous competition of a foreign rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price.”
Who was this dastardly foreign rival?
“None other than the sun,” wrote Bastiat. He begged the French government to pass a law forbidding all citizens to allow sunlight to enter their homes. (Yes, his petition was a satire; in economists’ circles, this is what passes for radical high jinks.)
Alas, the prostitution industry lacks a champion as passionate, even in jest, as Bastiat. And unlike the sugar and steel industries, it holds little sway in Washington’s corridors of power—despite, it should be said, its many, many connections with men of high government office. This explains why the industry’s fortunes have been so badly buffeted by the naked winds of the free market.
Prostitution is more geographically concentrated than other criminal activity: nearly half of all Chicago prostitution arrests occur in less than one-third of 1 percent of the city’s blocks. What do these blocks have in common? They are near train stations and major roads (prostitutes need to be where customers can find them) and have a lot of poor residents—although not, as is common in most poor neighborhoods, an overabundance of female-headed households.
This concentration makes it possible to take Venkatesh’s data and merge it with the Chicago Police Department’s citywide arrest data to estimate the scope of street prostitution citywide. The conclusion: in any given week, about 4,400 women are working as street prostitutes in Chicago, turning a combined 1.6 million tricks a year for 175,000 different men. That’s about the same number of prostitutes who worked in Chicago a hundred years ago. Considering that the city’s population has grown by 30 percent since then, the per-capita count of street prostitutes has fallen significantly. One thing that hasn’t changed: for the customer at least, prostitution is only barely illegal. The data show that a man who solicits a street prostitute is likely to be arrested about once for every 1,200 visits.
The prostitutes in Venkatesh’s study worked in three separate areas of the city: West Pullman, Roseland, and Washington Park. Most of these neighborhoods’ residents are African American, as are the prostitutes. West Pullman and Roseland, which adjoin each other, are working-class neighborhoods on the far South Side that used to be almost exclusively white (West Pullman was organized around the Pullman train factory). Washington Park has been a poor black neighborhood for decades. In all three areas, the race of the prostitutes’ clientele is mixed.
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