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.
Continue reading 'More Freakonomics: Chicago cops sleep with more prostitutes than they arrest' >
