The Economics Of Prostitution
I have recently come across an interesting paper written in 2001 by Edslund and Korn, two well-respected economists, who published
"A Theory of Prostitution" in the Journal of Political Economy. The paper considered wives and prostitutes as economic "goods" that can be substituted for each other. Men buy, women sell.
They used market analysis to tackle the questions: Why do prostitutes make so much money? Prostitution is, seemingly, a low-skill but high-pay profession with few upfront costs, micro-miniskirts and stiletto heels aside.
Developing the consequences of their mathematical model, Edlund and Korn argue that the primary reason for the income differential is not the risk sometimes associated with the practice of prostitution but rather that prostitutes greatly diminish their chances for marriage by virtue of their occupation. Men generally don't want to marry (ex)prostitutes, and so women must be relatively well-compensated in order to forgo the opportunity to marry.
Prostitutes make more money--in some cases, a lot more money--than do girls who work for a living. This held true even for places where prostitution is legal and relatively safe. In short, prostitutes aren't necessarily being paid more for their increased risk of going to jail or the hospital.
Edlund and Korn admit that spouses and prostitutes aren't exactly alike. Wives, in truth, are superior to prostitutes in the economist's sense of being a good whose consumption increases as income rises--like fine wine. This may explain why prostitution is less common in wealthier countries. But the implication remains that wives and prostitutes are--if not exactly like Coke and Pepsi--something akin to champagne and beer. The same sort of thing.
The model also predicts that how much a woman damages her chances to marry by becoming a prostitute depends on how likely it is that she'll be exposed as one.
The likelihood shrinks if the woman leaves home and migrates to a different part of the country or to a different country altogether. This would also explain why foreign prostitutes are likely to be cheaper than domestic ones.
One last prediction the model makes is that the income differential paid to prostitutes will rise with the status the culture accords wives.
That is, if wives are valued highly, would-be prostitutes are giving up a lot by becoming prostitutes and will require more money to do so. And if wives have few privileges, would-be prostitutes aren't giving up much to become prostitutes and thus need less inducement to do so.
Of course the economical model is biased by the raw assumptions made by the 2 economists. In particular, the assumption that there is no "third way" between wife and prostitution is problematic, if not outright offensive.
Like any statistical model, this one ignores the diversity of real people and the complexities of love and pleasure, changing social mores, et cetera. Still, once all its equations have been solved, a simple fact remains: Most women enter prostitution for the money.
