The article below appears in the May issue of Portfolio.com magazine. It says that 700,000 men in the U.S. use escorts each year. And that contributes over $100 million to the economy. At least we are doing our part to help keep the economy from falling into a recession!...lol...

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The Escort Economy

by Duff McDonald and Miriam Datskovsky
May 2008 Issue

A back-of-the-pillowcase analysis of just how big the high-end call-girl business really is.


While Eliot Spitzer will hereafter be known as Client 9, he can take comfort in the fact that he is by no means alone. About 700,000 men in the U.S. (or 0.65 percent) pay prostitutes for carnal relations each year, according to one survey.

Still, the thousands of dollars Spitzer spent for what many people believe is a low-triple-digit transaction at most was eye-popping. That’s because he wasn’t tangling with your run-of-the-mill streetwalker; he was participating in the high-end, room-service-style escort economy, a slice of the industry that allows customers to order in advance, pick from a number of menus, even pay with a credit card. How large is this part of the business? After isolating the three typical escort experiences and consulting with economists and academics, Condé Nast Portfolio calculated a number.

EXPERIENCE NO. 1
THE SPITZER
(a.k.a. the No. 9)
For the discerning gentleman (or nationally known ­politician) who regards privacy as paramount.
Estimated portion of escort clientele: 5 percent.
Escort: $3,200 ($2,700 or so, plus a $500 credit to stay in the escort’s good graces).
Two hotel rooms (Club-floor rooms at the Mayflower hotel in Washington): $938
Train ticket for trans­porting escort to and from the meeting place (say, from New York to D.C. and back, on the local train and not the Acela): $138
“Wining and dining” (at the minibar): $50
Taxi to and from the hotel: $18
Atmosphere ­(a classical CD to set the mood): $14
A.T.M. fee, if you happen to be short on cash: $2

Estimated Total Cost: $4,360
EXPERIENCE NO. 2
THE PLATINUM CLUB
A weekend-long encounter for the globetrotting billionaire, who will fly his escort to the rendezvous instead of making her take Amtrak. Why? Because he can.
Estimated portion of escort clientele: 1 percent
Escort: $4,500
Hotel room (a night at the Setai penthouse in Miami Beach, for example): $30,000
Private jet for transporting escort to and from the meeting place (a four-hour round-trip flight): $15,400
Wining and dining: $1,000
Distracting the wife with a spa weekend: $5,000
Atmosphere (a diamond necklace she’ll probably sell on eBay): $5,000
Middlemen and ­verification services (how an escort business checks out its clients): $3,000
Estimated Total Cost: $63,900

EXPERIENCE NO. 3
THE REGULAR V.I.P.
For your average successful guy—say, the tech executive or the Wall Streeter on a business trip. You know someone who has done this. Seriously.
Estimated portion of escort clientele: 94 percent
Escort: $500
Internet connection and telephone ­service for finding and booking escorts: $40 per month
Estimated Total Cost: $540

THE BOTTOM LINE
The sum of the cost of each experience times its portion of escort clientele gives us the cost of the average escort experience.
A.E.E. = (cost × portion)Spitzer + (cost × portion)Platinum + (cost × portion)V.I.P.
A.E.E. = ($4,360 × .05) + ($63,900 × .01) + ($540 × .94)
Cost of Average Escort Experience: $1,364.60
Multiply A.E.E. by the annual number of trysts1: Total escort economy = A.E.E. x annual trysts = $1,364.60 x 80,367
Value of Total U.S. Escort Economy: $109,668,808


NOTE: 1The National Health and Social Life Survey found that men who frequent prostitutes average 2.3 visits each. Combining 2007 census data with these findings yields a total of 1.61 million tricks. Based on academics’ assumptions, 5 percent of these are with escorts and not streetwalkers or brothel sex workers, resulting in 80,367 escort trysts.
Sources: Taggert Brooks, economist, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse; Kristen Monaco, economist, California State University–Long Beach; Russ Alan Prince, president of Prince & Associates; Sudhir Venkatesh, sociology professor, Columbia University.

First: The low end is $500?   Wow that is the very high end here.

Second: The $40 per month for communications is not just used for escorts, so that is garbage to include that in the amount paid

Third: only 5% are with escorts?   I think it is larger than that.

...and that is just for starters.

IMHO, every assumption, every number put into this is formula is terribly wrong. Shit in, shit out.

What's even worse is that most of mainstream America will not even qustion these bullshit numbers.

but is seems not.  LOL JK

Sources: Taggert Brooks, economist, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse; Kristen Monaco, economist, California State University–Long Beach; Russ Alan Prince, president of Prince & Associates; Sudhir Venkatesh, sociology professor, Columbia University.

global warming, but we better not go there. . . here.

Bad journalism. "700,000 men...according to one survey". What survey? Cite it. Then they come up with 80,000 escort trysts...divided by 360 days per year = 220 per day? In the US? 4 visits per state a day? Unbelievable.Can you spell F-O-O-L?

What did he mean the hobbyist averages 2.3... 2.3 a month? a year?  he wasn't specific on that....

$500 is average depending on which part of the country you are in.... in L.A. the prices are more inflated than some parts of the country.  New York might be the same way.  I noticed that Phoenix rates are pretty low, even though they have a lot of good looking girls there.

Some grad students of Taggert Brooks, et. al. who have i-pods permanently implanted in their ears.

In the Note:

"Based on academics’ assumptions, 5 percent of these are with escorts and not streetwalkers or brothel sex workers"

Given the number of brothel ladies, it would be generous to assume that they serviced the same number of gents as all the escorts combined.

So, that would leave 90+% seeing streetwalkers? Scary thought.

Maybe they need a TER for streetwalkers (TSR?). That would be a huge biz. Then again, guys who see SW are not likely to fork over $20 to buy a membership to TSR.

Well, Portfolio is a magazine for the Wall Street crowd.

So they are using the same kind of "math" that CNBC uses when they bring in top real estate brokers from Manhattan and Beverly Hills who conclude that the real estate market is just fine because the "top end" ($20m+) is doing great, the "middle range" ($10-20m) is stable, and there is only a slight slowdown is in the "low end" ($5-10m).  Yes, I'm serious, I saw that debate.

In short it has no bearing on any reality.

It's not that the authors are malicious.  It's that they're sitting in Manhattan, surrounded by Manhattan costs, and would rather die than go as far as the New Jersey suburbs.

It's also why a bunch of DC economists in multi-million dollar Georgetown townhomes think the economy is doing fine.

And why the music executives with their private conceirges to do all their shopping for them don't understand that it's not that we want to steal copyrighted material, it's that we just fucking hate the bullshit we have to go through in order to buy it legally.

I could think of a million other examples.

They should have done 15 minutes of research into our pricing system, across the board and by classification, in order to get a realistic number. As it is, their data is completely worthless and unrelated to any escort I know of. If I go off the top of my head, and assume that every escort makes what I do per annum, I'd say we are churning up at least double what the mag estimated, as a whole.

The magazine is assuming also that wealthy men do shit "just because they can," which is NOT the case. Wealthier men would be the one's to let me make my own travel arrangements because they wouldn't want their name to be associated with mine in the event of a crisis. Trust me, wifey's not at the spa. She's on a religious pilgrimage to the Temple of the Pool Boy. I don't know how those rich, crazy bastards do it, but they can go years without seeing each other and still maintain the perfect image of happy family life.

Not even NASA can get it right within several magnitudes.

Watch your asteroids out there.

Click link:



http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080415/sc_afp/spaceastronomygermany_080415214429