Buy a Plane, Buy a Companion?

The WSJ has an article on how the boom in wealth in recent times has led to a whole new tier of escort pricing (all of this in conjunction with the Spitzer story). Maybe the most interesting bit is some info towards the end of the article on the prevalence of purchased sex among the super rich:

According to a survey by Russ Alan Prince, president of Connecticut-based wealth-research firm Prince & Associates, in his book “The Sky’s The Limit,” a sizable percentage of the super wealthy use escorts. He surveyed 661 people who owned private jets. It found that 34% of males and 20% of females had paid for sex.

Spitzer's 'Kristen'

It looks like they may have a sort-of-masked photo of Eliot Spitzer's girl here.

UPDATE: Even the NYT has outed Ms. Dupre, complete with pictures from her MySpace page!

Frisky 5-0

I hit on a mention on another blog of a forthcoming paper by Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) and Sudir Venkatesh (familiar to Freakonomics readers as the crazy Indian guy who went into the projects in Chicago to study the street level economics of the drug trade. This piece (yet to be published, but a preliminary copy is available here as a PDF) is about the economics of street prostitutes in Chicago.

Perhaps the most interesting result: there is a lot more crooked officer stuff going on than expected (or at least than I had expected. They figure that roughly 3% of all tricks turned by the average street hooker were freebies demanded by police in order to avoid arrest!

Also interesting (and counter to what everyone else would have assumed): having a pimp is worth it! The girls with pimps had higher per-hour wage equivalents, even after subtracting out the pimp's take.