Fran Langum of Blue Gal says
Several bloggers including Echidne have pointed out the stupidity of the Freakonomics piece on prostitution. Working up outrage (over their utilitarian arguments re paying for sex) is difficult when faced with the Total Asperger Blinders of the authors: borderline autistic economists who don’t insert “humanity” into their equations don’t deserve a lot of ‘analysis.’ (Next up: the economy is down, so why aren’t more parents eating their babies?)
Note: lest you think she’s joking check out the highlighted sentences of this 2002 article in Slate.com by Steven Landsburg (emphasis mine.)
I am privileged to teach in one of the world’s most respected economics departments. We’re on pretty much everyone’s top-15 list, and by a lot of measures, we’re considered top-five. I mention this by way of pointing out that this is not some bunch of bozos we’re talking about here.
And yet somehow last summer, we managed to spend a week in a state of collective befuddlement, obsessing over a seemingly impenetrable conundrum that came up over lunch: If people stand still on escalators, then why don’t they stand still on stairs?
It was observed early on that if you stand still on stairs, you’ll never get anywhere. But for reasons I can no longer entirely reconstruct, that explanation was dismissed as overly simplistic.
Of course if I was too hard on them I’d have to explain how managed to hang on to a seven year old memory of an article about economists and escalators. And I remember the smell of simmering brain cells during a numbers-theory midterm I took in combined computability and cognition (a cheerful exploration of the limits of rationality) where one of the two questions was “prove that two plus two equals four.” Which, if you can’t use arithmetic or what you learned in pre-school, is tougher than it sounds.
And it’s not like imponderably obvious questions don’t deserve scrutiny. My favorite cautionary example about gender as a social construct instead of objective reality is the case of Joan of Arc, for whom wearing men’s clothing was so obviously a crime against God and nature that her English captors used that as the legal reason to burn her at the stake! Rather than than, say, leading a peasant army against her English captors, which she also did. Point being that what seems obvious isn’t always.
But I digress. The rest of Fran’s post turns an paragraph from the Freakonomics essay and turns it into an also fascinating and fundamental question about what constitutes the essence of prostitution: what exactly does it mean when a businessman in Texas phones a sex-worker in Chicago who charges him to fly down and do… something or other involving non-sexual devices and activities that “most people wouldn’t even recognize as sex per se.” Oh, that and she’s got a funny section about how if someone who’s paid to simulate having sex on film is an “actor” and someone else who’s paid to do non-sexual things is a “prostitute” then what happens if a “prostitute” buys a camera…
No, seriously, go read Fran’s whole, entirely work-safe post, and site, here.
Submitted by 3252 (not verified) on Wed, 2009-10-21 19:21.
A couple of comments - one, in response to something said in the original article, I suspect that the reason why more women aren't "high-class escorts" as opposed to "street prostitutes" is in a large part because there seem to be minimum entry requirements which not all women can meet (must be very attractive, plus they must be wealthy and intelligent or good at faking those things).
Two, I don't understand what's difficult about proving 2+2=4 without using arithmetic. Just take 2 things and another 2 things, put them together, and count them. Repeat a number of times, using different things every time, and if you always end up with 4 (and barring any freakish circumstances, you should) and that's proof enough right there. Or is this some weird thing where you pretend that numbers don't exist and somehow try to prove that 4 exists anyway?