I can’t say I was too impressed by Freakonomics when it first came out a couple of years ago.  It’s main gimmick is to present counter intuitive  positions while trying too hard to be clever and amusing.  The result was a one trick pony that got pretty tedious pretty quickly, for my taste.  The authors simply aren’t serious researchers, but rather shameless self promoters.  I have no doubt that they are genuine bores at cocktail parties across the fruited plain.

But the book was a success, prompting the inevitable sequel, the poorly titled SuperFreakonomics.  The authors were evidently desperately seeking new selling points, so of course they went after a sure thing, the world’s oldest profession.

Read more at ABC News…

‘SuperFreakonomics’: Prostitution as Career Choice
Laws of Supply and Demand: Prostitutes Do ‘Things You Can’t Get From Your Girlfriend’
By Bill Weir & Kimberly Launier

What do prostitutes and a department store Santa Clauses have in common?

If sex acts were stocks, which ones would yield history’s biggest gains and losses?

And as patrons of the world’s oldest profession, have men become the unlikely beneficiaries of the feminist movement? Or are prostitutes becoming shrewd entrepreneurs in the midst of a volatile financial market?

These are just some of the provocative questions swirling through the minds of economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner. In their first book, “Freakonomics,” they managed to spin dense, dry data into best-selling cocktail party fodder by using crack dealers, sumo wrestlers and baby names to explain what people want and how things work under the law of unintended consequences.

Dubner and Levitt argue… that in some ways this has been very good for high-end prostitutes.

“Prostitution is one of the few — if not the only — sector of the labor force that’s dominated by women, and always has been. And that arises from the very simple fact that, you know, there are a lot of men who want to have a lot of sex more than they are able to get for free,” said Dubner.

Before World War II, if a young man wanted sex, he had two basic options: marriage or a brothel. So in the 1930s, one in five American men lost his virginity to a prostitute.

A profitable sector for hookers — until the sexual liberation movement in the 1960s changed the business of intimacy, and a generation of “free love” altered the marketplace forever. The modesty traditionally displayed by women in search of Mr. Right evolved to a bold pursuit of Mr. Right Now. And an era of casual sex — prostitution’s direct rival — was conceived.

“The reason the relative price has fallen so much is because there is competition from women who will have sex for free,” said Dubner.

Business of Being a High-End Prostitute

A boon for men but only temporarily. For as social morales shifted and new trends of sexual tastes emerged, so too did the taboos. Prostitutes quickly recognized the business opportunities in braving this new world.

“In simple economics — the kinds of acts that prostitutes do today, it’s not conventional sex. I mean, it is the kinds of things you can’t get from your girlfriend. So the most depraved things are, you know, are recorded in their day than you could, that you could ever imagine,” said Dubner.

Morals may have changed, but only to a point. Prostitution is still illegal in most of America, but the law of the land is less powerful than the law of supply and demand.

And there is perhaps no student more attentive to this fact, and glad for it, than a call girl named “Allie” who asked to be included in Dubner and Levitt’s research.

“She is a very bright woman. She understands the economics pretty well,” said Dubner. “She said, ‘Thank God prostitution is illegal,’ ’cause if it weren’t, I wouldn’t be making $500 an hour; I’d be offered maybe $100 an hour, and I wouldn’t be a prostitute. I would probably be back doing what I was doing — which was working as a computer technician for a Fortune 50 company.’”

You can buy Super Freakonomics at Amazon.com…