Interesting article.  

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/08/economist-explains-7

because of internet porn every girl wants to be a porn star
because the economy sucks, and there is a huge disparity between the rich and the poor.  

just an uneducated guess.  
I don't care why more pussy for me!

Also, I've seen no evidence prices in NY have fallen at all.

I think most statisticians would challenge those results as not being truly representative- perhaps finding the median rate would show a more accurate result.

but you're unlikely to get significantly different results just by looking at median vs. mean here. The cases where that would make a difference would be instances where you have extreme values in the data; for example looking at income data here the average may be $50k/yr, but the data ranges from someone making $10k/yr to Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, whose annual income can range in the billions. In that case, the median could be significantly lower than the average, which is skewed higher by the extremely large values in the data.
Based on my admittedly limited sampling of the data on what different providers charge, I've rarely seen ads for less than $200/hr or more than $1000/hr. That sort of range is unlikely to cause significant skew between median and average.
You'd be better off criticizing the data for say, simply giving the same weight to all providers, regardless of popularity.

I have so many questions about The Economist's methodology, and how they arrived at their conclusions.

Having worked as both a researcher for a sex worker study and been in the industry myself, I have a lot of issues with how studies like these are run. I get that obtaining straight facts in an underground economy where sampling can be particularly difficult is always going to be a real challenge, but at least give us some full disclosure when you state your facts or hypotheses.

For starters, they "analysed" 190,000 profiles of FSWs in the business. How did they do this analysis? I'm skeptical about accepting the results at face value without any further disclosure of details such as how they extracted their data, what variables were considered, and if they attempted to exclude duplicates (as I'm sure women can have multiple profiles across different review sites). I'm also curious to see what type of software was used and a breakdown of the statistics (beyond just what was listed in "More bang for your buck: How new technology is shaking up the oldest business").

Secondly, does The Economist ever include any references/citations as footnotes? "The fall can be attributed to the 2007-8 financial crisis." Says who?? Sure the publication's research team crunched some numbers based on secondary data from unnamed review sites, but those figures don't spell out correlation to a particular economic event, unless the researchers gathered that conclusion from an additional source.  

Who knows, they could be right and maybe the 2007-8 crisis is what started the decline in rates. All I'm saying is it's a bit disappointing for a publication like The Economist, that typically appeals to a more intelligent, progressive demographic, to conduct this [seemingly poorly run] study, then offer a number of conclusions and expect readers to just take their word for it.  

Or maybe my expectations are totally unrealistic for a mainstream magazine. While I appreciate The Economist's sex-positive attitude and attempt to shed light on modern-day prostitution in developed countries, I wish they would give their readers a bit more credit. We want answers, but only if they're good scientifically obtained answers!

Rates have risen a great deal in NYC the past couple of years, but this is only from looking at reviews and not compiling data.  Perhaps anecdotally, monger complaints have always pointed to NYC's much higher price point.  I also see that providers I'm interested in always have a higher NYC than any other city they visit.  

I understand that NYC is more expensive than most places int he US, but there are still deals to be had, especially "off peak" and non weekends.

C'est la vie...

6, 7 and 8 bills for an hour is no longer unusual here. This "research" may be fine for Smallville but not in Metropolis.  

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I want nichole kidmin in dead calm

They engineers building the sex robots will never be able to capture  
that look on a young girls face, when I open the door, and she gazes upon my fat ass!

But it is highly dependent on the individual provider.  The girl charging 500 now who could get 700 in 2006 is still busy and perhaps overbooked.  But many girls are charge 500 in 2006 and finding themselves have to give additional time or lower prices via "specials."

NYC is a different place, but it still happens there.  Ask girls who tour there how hard it is for them to get pre-bookings and bookings when a Holiday Inn equivalent (three star hotel) is in the 300/night range and when you can easily spend 100/day just on food and transport.  

This economy is great if you own lots of stocks or property, so that segment can pay the rates.  But those who derive most of their earnings from ordinary income are finding a lotta pressure to see any recovery, really.  

The hedge fund manager making eight figures isn't under pressure if the going rate is 500/hour.  The Wall Street trader who went from 600k/year to half that is feeling pressure.  Guess which is a bigger part of the provider demand side?  

Also, MANY more girls are taking the plunge and finding that they can't get a steady flow of clients at 500/hour.  Many are providing unadvertised specials for more hours or even doing bodyrub rates as loss leaders to generate clientele.  

But as I said, hard to paint with a broad brush.  Some providers are overbooked still.  Some are struggling to make ends meet.

The "offer" price is hardly the same thing as the "market" price.  

I suppose if every provider paid taxes, we could just ask for a W-2 for proof.  

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