Those Freakonomists are at it again: Steven Levitt teamed up with Columbia sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh to measure the economics of prostitutes in Chicago. After surveying various pimps, whores, and Chicago Police Department incident data, they discovered that street prostitution yields an average of $27 an hour. That's a lot better than Mickey D's, but then again, you don't have to worry about getting beaten to death when you're washing heads of lettuce.
But what's most shocking is that 3 percent of all tricks performed by prostitutes who fly solo without a pimp are "freebies" given to cops to keep from getting arrested. This bargaining tactic leads to prostitutes only getting arrested once every 450 tricks or so, which convinced the authors to conclude that "a prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one."
Ouch, Chicago's finest.
Prostitutes end up giving out 1 in 20 tricks as freebies to gang members and for protection to be allowed to continue hooking. That's a lot of pro boner, sorry, bono work.
As if that wasn't sad enough, it turns out condoms are used far less than expected — about 20 percent of the time. Apparently, prostitutes can charge more when condoms aren't used, and that's consistent with surveys done with Mexican and Indian prostitutes.
Iiiiiiiiiiick.
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