Of poor prostitutes, rich suicide bombers and others

Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner make an interesting pair. Levitt is an economist and Dubner a journalist, and between them, in 2005, they wrote the best-selling book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

Now the duo is just out with its second book, the equally interestingly titled Superfreakonomics — Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.

Like the original book, this one is a racy read and springs surprises when the reader least expects.

One of the most interesting pieces of research that the authors cite is on prostitutes in the city of Chicago. The research, carried out by Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University in New York, threw up interesting results. 

“It turns out that the typical street prostitute in Chicago works 13 hours a week, performing 10 sex acts during that period, and earns an hourly wage of approximately $27. So her weekly take-home pay is roughly $350…Many of these women took on other, non-prostitution work, which Venkatesh also tracked. Prostitution paid about four times more than those jobs. But as high as that wage premium maybe, it looks pretty meagre when you consider the job’s downsides. In a given year, a typical prostitute in Venkatesh’s study experienced a dozen incidents of violence. At least 3 of the 160 prostitutes who participated died during the course of the study... Moreover, the women’s wage premium pales in comparison to the ones enjoyed by even low-rent prostitutes from a hundred years ago.”

So the question — why have prostitute wages fallen?

The authors have an interesting explanation. “Because the demand has fallen dramatically. Not the demand for sex. That is still robust. But prostitution, like any other industry, is vulnerable to competition. Who poses the greatest competition to a prostitute? Simple: Any woman who is willing to have sex with a man for free. It is no secret that sexual mores have evolved substantially in recent decades. The phrase ‘casual sex’ did not exist a century ago (to say nothing of ‘friends with benefits).

Sex outside of marriage was much harder to come up and carried significantly higher penalties than it does today…At least 20% of American men born between 1933 and 1942 had their first sexual intercourse with a prostitute. Now imagine that same young man 20 years later. The shift in sexual mores has given him such a great supply of unpaid sex. In his generation, only 5% of men lose their virginity to a prostitute…So premarital sex emerged as a viable alternative for prostitution.”

Another interesting research that the authors illustrate is about terrorists. It was carried out by Alan Krueger, an economist, who now works

as assistant secretary for economic policy in the US government. Krueger “combed through a Hezbollah newsletter called Al-Ahd (The Oath) and compiled biographical details on 129 dead shahids (martyrs). He then compared them with men from the same age bracket in the general populace of Lebanon. The terrorists, he found, were less likely to come from a poor family (28% versus 33%) and more likely to have at least high school education (47% versus 38%).”

In another analysis of suicide bombers in Palestine carried out by Claude Berrebi had similar findings. “Only 16% (of suicide bombers) came from impoverished families, versus more than 30% of male Palestinians overall. More than 60% of bombers, meanwhile, had gone beyond high school versus 15% of the populace.”

These numbers go against the commonly held opinion that poverty and illiteracy give rise to education. “In general, Krueger found, ‘terrorists tend to be drawn from well-educated, middle class or high-income families.’ Despite a few exceptions — the Irish Republican Army and perhaps the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka (there isn’t enough evidence to say) —the trend holds true around the world, from Latin American terrorist groups to the Al Qaeda members who carried out September 11 attacks in the United States.”
Now the question of course is how do you explain this?  Levitt and Dubner think, “It may be that when you’re hungry, you’ve got better things to worry about than blowing yourself up. It may be that terrorist leaders place a high value on competence, since a terrorist attack requires more orchestration than a typical crime.”

 The book is full of such interesting findings. But one story that really takes the cake is about childbirth. “When a baby presented itself feet- or derriere-first, there was a good change it would get stuck in the uterus, endangering both mother and child. The forceps, a simple set of metal tongs, allowed a doctor or midwife to turn a baby inside uterus and adroitly pick pluck it out, headfirst…It was thought to have been invented in the early seventeenth century by a London obstetrician named Peter Chamberlen.

The forceps worked so well that Chamberlen kept it a secret, sharing it only with sons and grandsons who continued in the family business. It wasn’t until mid-eighteenth century that the forceps passed into general use…What was the cost of this technological hoarding? According to surgeon and author Atul Gawande, “it had been millions of lives lost.”