> it'd be a shame if a woman was peer-pressured to do a job she hates because "just getting married and being a housewife" is stigmatized these days. The pressure does not come from being stigmatized but from the fact that a single person income is not enough to feed a family of four in plenty of places. And if you don't have children and your spouse is out working you might as well go to work yourself, rather than t…
I agree - if anything, being a stay-at-home mother is seen as a luxurious option these days. Most of the mothers I know dream of the time they can quit their job and just be a mother, instead of having to juggle work and kids.
>Most of the mothers I know dream of the time they can quit their job and just be a mother, instead of having to juggle work and kids.
I'm a bloke, but we (my wife and I) share running of our business and care of the children (one toddler, one infant) pretty close to 50-50.
Effectively between us we're SAH parenting.
How?
Those who say they envy us aren't prepared to live in poverty in order to look after their own kids. We four now live on about 40% of what we two lived on - less than a single minimum wage. It's very hard work particularly with no nearby grandparents.
Problems with the article: > Throughout history, it has invariably been easier to be male than female. Yes, this is an overgeneralisation and yes, there are exceptions, but by any important measure, women have had it rougher than men. This one is a PC-friendly thing to say, the opposite point of view is not. If you haven't read it, I must urge you to check out the excellent "Is There Anything Good About Men?" essay b…
> "by any important measure, women have had it rougher than men." ... the opposite point of view ... Across history, it's estimated that 80% of women all-time had children, whereas only 40% of men did - the majority of men died without descendents. Having children generally makes your life rougher. Across history, women have rarely had the choice to opt out of that, while men often have. Furthermore, women have gener…
Having children makes your life rougher if you have to drive them places and arrange for their entertainment or detainment every hour of the day for fear of being arrested for child abuse.
It's a bit different if they're going to be with you on the farm and, within a few years, helping out.
"So the real puzzle isn’t why someone like Allie becomes a prostitute, but rather why more women don’t choose this career." Most women don't do this because of the social stigma, and those that don't care about the social stigma don't do it because they don't want to contract STDs--in particular, Genital Herpes which can be transmitted through skin-to-skin contact. I'm surprised that the article didn't examine the he…
> Most women don't do this because of the social stigma, and those that don't care about the social stigma don't do it because they don't want to contract STDs You know, some people don't do it because they don't want to, just like there are plenty of people who don't collect garbage because they don't want to.
I took that as a given, kragen.
Perhaps I should have prefaced my remark with:
"for those women who are interested in the profession...."
[edit] it's interesting though - amongst homosexual men, there's significantly less stigma against prostitution AND significantly less care about the health risks. There's also more men who are doing it and they make less money than the women.
> Well, to me that's a reason not to read the essay, because it sounds quite like a naturalistic fallacy to care whether someone had offspring. I think you'll find it a thought-provoking essay regardless of your personal ethics. It's well-written, has lots of numbers, and brings up a lot of counterintuitive/counter-cultural points. I found it through Hacker News originally, actually.
regardless of your personal ethics My comment has nothing to do with ethics. Your prime example sounds like a common logical fallacy, which is independent of my ethics and raises my suspicions about the contents of the essay. I don't understand why I'm being downvoted into oblivion.
If I had downvoted you it would have been because your reason not to read the essay seemed a poor one.
However this assessment that it was a poor reason would have been itself post hoc, since I have already discovered that it's a fairly good essay. In fact the quote about number of descendants doesn't represent the essay well and I'm not sure why your parent chose it. So it's more that you turn out to have made a bad decision, than that your reasoning was unsound.
Fair enough. Me vs. Professor of Economics Steven Levitt: Levitt: 1 hand-picked prostitue that was a guest lecturer in his college class. Me: - PROSTITUTION IS THE MOST DANGEROUS JOB IN AMERICA. The murder rate is 1 in 490. Compare that to the fishing industry, where the death rate is 1 in 775. - Eighty-two percent of prostitutes reported having been physically assaulted since entering prostitution. - Women trafficke…
Women trafficked to the United States have been forced to have sex with 400-500 men to pay off $40,000 in debt for their passage. I knew a couple of individuals in college who, through their time as a student, had sex with about that many people recreationally. (In one case, it was in the biblical sense, and yes I have been tested and cleared many times since then.)
There's a pretty clear difference between wanting to sleep with someone, and being forced to sleep with someone by a trafficker.
I posted a critical view of sentiments expressed in this article a while back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1573319
Useful post. It addresses some of the facile comments above that the Freakonomics article is just about business/pricing strategy, by calling out some of the non-economic opinions pushed in the article. ("Allie is like the ideal wife", Allie is successful because she sees good in everyone, etc.) It's glib and myopic -- concentrating on this little aspect of pricing, and highlighting all the sunny and upbeat sides of…
But what are the bad things for a high-end escort? They wrote about how she felt like she couldn't communicate about her career. They also wrote that a lot of the safety issues that plague low end prostitutes weren't issues for Allie. The main bad thing that they didn't speak about were health concerns.
The article misses everything that isn't economic. That might sound appropriate for economics, but economics is influenced by human behavior, and human behavior is influenced by a lot more than economic factors. For instance, to say that a high-end prostitute working fifteen hours a week is more like a trophy wife than like a street hooker is utterly oblivious to the many, many obligations a trophy wife has. Being a trophy wife is, if not a full-time job, at least a half-time job. A trophy wife has to fulfill all the expectations of a wife of her social class, and fulfill them exceptionally well. She has to entertain. She has to manage a household. She has to manage her social life and social image, and often her husband's as well. Often a trophy wife has to bear and raise children. Of all the duties of a trophy wife, having sex with her husband is among the least essential. I would wager it is the most negotiable, the most often neglected, and the least likely to cause serious dissatisfaction on the husband's part. After all, a husband can develop other sexual interests, but his social image is built around his one wife.
Aye - being a stay-at-home husband and father ought to be as equally socially acceptable as wife & mother.
No, I am sorry it is not. Anybody can stay at home. Not anyone can start up a company, or work at a senior level, or even work at a technical level. There are plenty of people who could never achieve that level of competence, they can stay at home.
This poster didn't say that anyone could be good at staying at home. They said anyone can stay at home. I think this is true and don't understand the downvotes.
So many jobs that pay that sort of cash. They're just not easy to get. It's that old 10,000 hours of practice thing again. If you're willing to build up a lot of experience in an arcane technical field that is in continuous demand, you can easily get that sort of cash, particularly in short-term fly-in-and-fix-the-thing gigs. I know of COBOL programmers in a bank that make $150/hr because they are irreplaceable now.…
Assuming $2,000 speaking fee for a 1 hour talk, and say, 2 hours of prep and 1 hour of travel - that's $500 an hour. Your assumption is way off. I have read from professional public speakers that for every minute of a speech, they will prepare on average about 1 hour. A 60 minute speech would have about 60 hours of preparation behind it. I am practising public speaking and while I haven't done longer speeches, my exp…
Whilst I'm sure that's true on technical areas of great detail, a lot of celebrity speakers turn up and do the same talk over and over again. This is particularly true in the case of someone with a story to tell, ie, war hero, ex politician, ex founder with a big IPO, etc.
Your point stands - I was just throwing figures around.
I'm doing my first conference presentations in two months time, and I expect to take probably 40-60 hours to present two 60 minute sessions. And I don't get paid for it at all!