When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants

by Steven D. Levitt

  I’m a High-End Call Girl; Ask Me Anything

  In SuperFreakonomics, we profiled a high-end escort whose entrepreneurial skills and understanding of economics made her a financial success. We call her Allie, which is neither her real nor professional name. There was so much interest in Allie after the book came out that she agreed to field reader questions on the blog. They are paraphrased below, along with Allie’s answers.

  Q. Can you tell us how you became an escort, and what your family thinks—or knows—about your occupation?

  A. My parents don’t know about my work, or anything else about my sex life. I was a programmer when I decided to quit my job and become an escort. I was single and meeting people through a popular dating website. Finding someone “special” proved to be difficult, but I did meet many nice men. I had grown up in a repressive small town and I was, at that time, looking to understand my own sexuality. I have never attached my self-worth to some idea of virginity or monogamy, but I still had not really explored many of my desires. I was meeting people living alternative lifestyles, and, as I got to know them, the stereotypes that I had built up started to come apart. During this time I was in my mid-twenties, and I had an active sex life. One day I decided to enter the occupation of “escort” on an online instant messaging profile. Within seconds I had many responses, and after about a week of talking to a few people, I decided to meet a dentist at a hotel. The experience wasn’t glamorous or nearly as sexy as I thought it might be. However, I came away from the experience thinking, “It wasn’t bad.” I began to think that if I just had one appointment a month, I could pay my car loan with it, and have a little extra money. Eventually, I chose to work as an escort exclusively. At that time, the reason I gave up my programming job was the free time. I was caring for a family member with a serious illness—the free time and money was a huge benefit.

  Q. Do you have any moral problem with what you do?

  A. I do not have a moral problem with having sex for money, as long as it’s safe, and between consenting adults. However, I have always been concerned about how the social and legal issues may affect my future and the people that I love.

  Q. What kind of clients do you have?

  A. My clients are generally white, married, and professional males, between forty and fifty years old, with incomes over $100,000 a year. They tend to be doctors, lawyers, and businessmen looking to get away for a few hours in the middle of the day.

  Q. How many of your clients are married men?

  A. Almost all of my clients are married. I would say easily over 90 percent. I’m not trying to justify this business, but these are men looking for companionship. They are generally not men that couldn’t have an affair [if they wanted to], but men who want this tryst with no strings attached. They’re men who want to keep their lives at home intact.

  Q. What do your clients’ wives know or think about them coming to you?

  A. I rarely got the opportunity to find out if the wives were okay with it, but I did see several couples, so I assume they were okay with it.

  Q. Do you know the real names of your clients?

  A. Yes. Always. I insist that they give me their full names and their place of work so that I can contact them there before we meet. I also check their identification when we meet. I also use verification companies, which assist escorts in verification of clients. These companies do the verification of the client and put them in a database so that when the client wants to meet with a girl for the first time, he doesn’t have to go through the verification process again. For a fee, I can call in and they will tell me if the client has a history of giving the girls problems, where he works, and his full name.

  Q. What are your out-of-pocket costs?

  A. $300 to $500 a month for my online basic ads

  $100 a year for the website

  $100 a month for a phone

  $1,500 a year for photography

  If I was touring then there were extra expenses such as travel costs, hotels, and more advertising costs.

  Q. Do you have any regrets about your chosen profession?

  A. Being an escort provided me with many opportunities that I’m not sure I would have gotten if I had not been an escort. That said, my choice to become an escort had a definite cost associated with it beyond the advertising, photos, and websites. I believe it is close to impossible to have a healthy relationship while working. So it can be a lonely life. In addition, hiding my job from my friends and family proved to be difficult for many reasons.

  Q. How do you think prostitution would change if it were legalized? Would you want your own child to become a prostitute?

  A. If the social and legal ramifications were gone, I think that being an escort might be like being a therapist (I have never been a therapist, so my knowledge is obviously limited). Like most escorts, a therapist sells his or her skills by the hour. A therapist also has to meet people for the first time not knowing who is walking in the door. Many have their own offices and work alone. In addition, the session is generally private and requires discretion. I imagine that many times therapists have patients that they like and some they don’t. A therapist’s revenue, like almost all other occupations, probably increases if the client feels that the therapist likes them. I don’t mean to imply that I have the skills of a trained therapist, or to in any way demean what they do; I’m just observing some obvious similarities. If I had a child, I would hope that they would feel empowered, and have the opportunity to do whatever they desire to do, and that they would be in charge of their own sexuality. This job has its downsides, though, and can take a high toll on a person. I know that it’s made many aspects of my life and my relationships more difficult. So, like any parent, I would always want more for my child than I had for myself.

  Q. So are you in favor of legalization?

  A. I feel that prostitution should be legal. If a couple meets for dinner and a bottle of wine, and have sex, that’s a date. If they meet for dinner and a bottle of wine, and have sex, with money in an envelope left on the dresser, that’s illegal. I realize that there are women in prostitution who are there because they feel like they have to be. These women work in a different part of the industry than I did. Many have drug or abuse issues, among other problems. I think, instead of spending time and finite resources on arresting and criminalizing these women, we should spend our resources on making sure that these women have other opportunities and a place to go for help. The women who don’t want to be prostitutes shouldn’t have to be, and they should be able to get the help they need. Women who want to be should be able to. I feel that no one should have to take a job to make a living that is against his or her own moral judgment.

  Q. How would legalization affect your business model?

  A. I’m sure it would cause me to lower my rates. I’m sure more people would take up prostitution as a profession, and I am sure more men would partake in the activity. That said, legalization does not remove all the barriers to entry. The job still would have a huge negative stigma associated with it, both for the escorts and the clients. In countries like Canada, enforcement of prostitution laws is extremely lax, and while rates are lower, they aren’t wildly different. So there would still be men out there afraid of their wives finding out, and I still wouldn’t want to share my job title with my family.

  Q. Dubner and Levitt wrote that you have some economics training. Has that informed the way you think about your occupation?

  A. Sure, here are some examples:

  Dinner with friends = opportunity cost

  Perfect information = review sites

  Transaction cost = setting up an appointment

  Repeated game = reputation

  Product differentiation = not a blonde

  Seriously, I wish I had known then what I know now.

  Freakonomics Radio Gets Results

  (SJD)

  It’s nice to have a podcast that is popular, but it’s another thing to have a podcast that actually changes t
he world. Can you guess which of our recent episodes changed the world? Maybe the one about how drivers are legally allowed to kill pedestrians? The one called “Fighting Poverty with Actual Evidence”? Or maybe the one about how the avocados we buy in the U.S. help fund Mexican crime cartels?

  Nope.

  Here’s an e-mail from a listener in Cincinnati named Mandi Grzelak:

  True story: while listening to your Feb. 6 podcast “What You Don’t Know About Online Dating,” I thought to myself, “I should try online dating!” After all, if NPR employees are on sites like OKCupid, I might have a shot with one! How amazing would that be?!

  Long story short: I signed up that afternoon, started with some e-mails, and went on my first date (from the site, not ever) on Feb. 10. Tim and I have been inseparable ever since, bring each other endless amounts of happiness, and last night he proposed. I, obviously, said yes. We plan to elope in NYC this August, to avoid a large dramatic wedding. But you and your families are welcome to join us.

  And it’s all thanks to you!!!

  We can die happy now. We may never move the needle on big social or policy issues, but as long as Mandi and Tim are together, we can take some satisfaction in that.

  CHAPTER 11

  Kaleidoscopia

  ©iStock.com/ninochka

  The previous ten chapters have been organized according to theme, which makes this book of blog posts different from the blog itself—because it has no organization whatsoever. One of us decides to write something on a given day and then—click!—it’s published. One post bears no relation to the others before or after it. This tends to give blog reading a kaleidoscopic quality—a quality we have tried to capture in this chapter, which has no discernible theme. A less charitable (or more discerning?) view might be that we found ourselves toward the end of this book with a supply of unrelated posts—a pile of miscellany—and decided to shoehorn them into a chapter that might have been more honorably titled “Miscellaneous.” That would also be true.

  Something to Think About While You Wait in Line at KFC

  (SDL)

  I’ve loved the chicken at KFC ever since I was a kid. My parents were cheap, so KFC was splurging when I was growing up. About twice a year my pleading, perhaps in combination with a well-timed TV advertisement, would convince my parents to bring the family to KFC.

  For as long as I have been eating KFC, the service has always been terrible.

  Yesterday was a good example. I went with my daughter Amanda. From the moment we entered the store to the time we left with our food, twenty-six minutes had elapsed. The line was so slow inside the restaurant that we eventually gave up and went through the drive-thru. We eventually got our food, but no napkins, straws, or plastic ware. That was still better than the time I went to KFC only to be told that they were out of chicken.

  What is so ironic about the poor service at KFC is that, at the corporate level, they seem to try so hard to achieve good service. The name tag on the guy behind the counter yesterday said that he was a “customer maniac,” or something like that, as part of KFC’s “customer mania.” A few years back, I seem to remember they were focused on total quality improvement. At another point, I think they had posted on the wall a list of ten customer-oriented service mantras all workers were supposed to strive for.

  So why is it that KFC’s service remains so bad? I have two mutually consistent hypotheses as to why:

  1. KFC doesn’t have enough people working. The next time you are at McDonald’s, count the number of workers. It always stuns me how many people are on duty. It is not uncommon to see fifteen to twenty people working at a time in a busy McDonald’s. There seem to be many fewer people working at KFC. I think there were only four or five workers yesterday when I visited.

  2. KFC’s clientele is poorer than the customers at other fast-food outlets, and poor people are less willing to pay for good service. There is no question in my mind that service is generally terrible in places frequented by the poor. Whether it is because poor people care less about service, I’m not sure. I do know that I virtually never saw bad service in the entire year I spent visiting Stanford, which I’ve always attributed to the fact that there are so many rich people in the area.

  Postmortem on The Daily Show

  (SDL)

  Well, I survived my appearance on The Daily Show. Some random reflections on the experience:

  First, Jon Stewart sure seems like a fantastic guy. Smart, friendly, down-to-earth, funny the whole time on and off the camera. Maybe he should run for president sometime. I would vote for him. His only problem is that he is not so tall, and Americans grow their presidents tall.

  Second, sitting in the studio, no matter how hard you to try, it is impossible to imagine that 2 million people are watching what you are doing (actually in my case 2,000,002 because my parents don’t usually watch, but they were watching last night). Which is good if you are someone like me who is inherently anti-social and frightened by crowds. It certainly would be more nerve-racking to do an interview in front of a live audience of 2 million people stretched out over the Mall in Washington.

  Third, television, except maybe Charlie Rose, is a terrible medium for trying to talk about books. I had a long interview—over six minutes—but Stewart was asking hard questions that I couldn’t give real answers to (essentially he wanted me to explain regression analysis, but to do it in fifteen seconds). One key point in Freakonomics is that we try to show the reader how we get our answers, not just assert that we are right. On TV, there just isn’t time to follow that path.

  Fourth, it sure is nice to be in front of an audience that is dying to laugh at and respond to anything you say. (For instance, I’m not sure why, but the audience burst out laughing when I mentioned crack cocaine.) I wish the students in my 9 A.M. undergraduate lecture were so responsive. Of course, if my lectures were one-tenth as entertaining as The Daily Show, I bet my students would be plenty responsive.

  Dental Wisdom

  (SJD)

  I really like my dentist, Dr. Reiss. He’s in his late sixties, maybe even in his early seventies. To say that he knows his way around the mouth is an understatement. But that’s not the only reason I like him. He recently told me how he solved a particular problem. Because he’s getting on in years, a lot of his patients were asking him if he was retiring soon. He didn’t like this question; he’s a guy who plays tennis twice a week, reads a million books, and keeps up on NYC’s cultural and political scenes with great vigor. So instead of deflecting these annoying retirement questions one at a time, he found a relatively inexpensive way to signal his intentions to anyone who cared: he bought new furniture and equipment for his office. Suddenly the questions stopped.

  As much as I generally dread the dentist’s chair, I always wind up learning something. Yesterday was no exception. I was asking Dr. Reiss about the causes of tooth decay—genetics vs. diet, etc. etc.—when he began explaining why toothpaste is such a bogus product. Any claims that toothpaste makes about preventing decay, whitening teeth, etc., are totally fallacious, Dr. Reiss told me, because the FDA can’t and won’t allow the ingredients necessary to perform those chores in an over-the-counter product that children can easily get hold of. (That’s why he recommends an antibacterial product like Gly-Oxide, a fairly foul-tasting but apparently effective means of killing the bacteria that cause decay.)

  The other thing I learned yesterday was far more interesting, with far greater implications. He told me that tooth decay in general, even among wealthy patients, is getting worse and worse, particularly for people in middle age and above. The reason? An increased reliance on medications for heart disease, high cholesterol, depression, etc. Many of these medications, Dr. Reiss explained, produce dry mouth, which is caused by a constricted salivary flow; because saliva kills bacteria in the mouth, a lack of it means increased bacteria, which leads to increased tooth decay. Given the choice of taking these medicines versus having some tooth decay, I’m sure most people would sti
ll choose the medicines—but I am guessing that most people haven’t thought about the link between the two.

  Unfortunately, I have to go back to Dr. Reiss today. At least I’ll probably learn a little something.

  What’s with All the Bullshit?

  (SDL)

  Last year the book On Bullshit by philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt was a surprise bestseller, even reaching number one on the New York Times bestseller list for one week. That is an amazing commercial success for my friends at Princeton University Press.

  The success of that book apparently inspired some other authors:

  The golfer John Daly has an autobiography out this week entitled My Life in and out of the Rough: The Truth About all the Bullshit You Think You Know About Me. This book is published by HarperCollins, the same people who published Freakonomics. They were scared to death of the title “Freakonomics” when my sister Linda Jines first thought it up. I guess they have loosened up a bit.