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You don't have to be a genius at economics to understand "Less hot girls are making more money than you in escorting while doing less. If you want to make more money, you just need move to where there are more rich, lonely, awkward guys." While I don't finish that fast, I'm pretty sure you don't need to elaborate much more for this to be within intellectual reach of anyone with an IQ of 95. Probably 90.
And I think the market situation tells us, clearly, that women with high enough IQ to comprehend and execute that plan, while also being willing to be prostitutes and prostitutes to nerds, are in short supply.
I am not convinced. Per google, the most expensive bottles of wine cost about half a million. This does not mean that there is a supply shortage of wine, merely that weird things happen when the uberrich engage in bidding wars. If the median price for an escort in SV was 10k$, then I would conclude that there is indeed a supply shortage.
Those bottles of wine are in short supply. If you can't comprehend of being in the market for those bottles of wine or those escorts, then you probably just don't understand the market in question. "Weird things happen when people engage in bidding wars" isn't an explanation, why is there a bidding war if there is infinite supply?
I think that with goods for conspicuous consumption, the price finding works a little different than for other goods.
Any vintner deciding to make fifty millions by just producing 100 bottles of a wine which is worth 500k$ a bottle will fail miserably, because the very fact that there are 100 bottles on the market will cap the price.
If anyone in SV is spending 30k$/weekend on an escort, that is obviously conspicuous consumption. The point is to signal that he can spend that much money. The identity of the escort is secondary, could be a former porn star, or Aella, the important thing is that his buddies have heard of her. If his buddy replies that he spend 10k$ on hiring an escort who is just as hot and smart as Aella, but much less famous, that has much less signaling value.
I think the bottleneck is not being hot and smart, it is being famous. There are thousands of actors in Hollywood who are pretty great actors. Most of them do not earn outrageous sums per movie, because a film-maker will have a hard time to persuade the audience that they are indeed good. The top tier actors will reliably draw a crowd because they have a large fan base, and being able to pay them millions is a good signal for the movie having a high production value, so the special effects will also be great.
When you said:
that rings to me like
To which I would reply that obviously Tom Cruise is in short supply (likely intentionally as a business decision). However, all of that is due to him being famous. A nobody with his acting talent and looks entering Hollywood would probably land some roles, but would make absolute peanuts compared to him unless he got lucky and rose to the top, and anyone contemplating to go to LA and shoot movies or to SV and work as an escort would be served much better by anchoring on the median income of their peers than on the top earners.
I think acting is a good example of what I'm talking about, where from an audience perspective utility is produced by marketing efforts. Wine and other Veblen goods function similarly.
Tom Cruise's fame and value is not produced purely or even primarily by Tom Cruise's talent, but by the combined effort of an industry, by agents and publicists and studios, and by Tom Cruise's own decisions to manage his image and fame to produce his stardom. He is a product of that system. ((Though Cruise is also a really good actor, in a lot of great films)) That used to be more true in old Hollywood than it is today, Tab Hunter is a good example, there's a great documentary on his career; Tab was made famous by the studio system that both made him big and protected him from the public consequences of his homosexuality, realized that the studio was making a lot of money off of him and tried to break out of the studio system, and his career immediately tanked because he no longer had the studio to make him big.
The audience watching Tom Cruise in a mediocre movie, say Jack Reacher, gets more utils out of watching the movie than they would watching the same movie with a no-name actor, because they like Tom Cruise. The person drinking a fancy rare bottle of wine from a fancy French vineyard is experiencing more utils in that moment than I get drinking two buck chuck, because of the marketing that convinces them that this is a great and rare bottle of wine. That kind of marketing genius is the talent and the labor and commitment that produces the utility for the customer.
A good example, more common to most experiences, is that fight fans get more out of watching the Heavyweight Championship of the world and pay more to watch it, than they do out of watching a smoker bout on the undercard of a local brawl, even if the latter is the more exciting fight. Most people get more out of watching the NBA finals than a great high school game. This is not the result of the players on the court, it is the result of the whole infrastructure of the league and the understanding that this is an important high level game. Donc...
Any random vintner can't just decide to do that. They need to work through decades of building industry credibility, making contacts, getting good reviews, building audience goodwill, and building a story of exclusivity that makes people think the bottles are worth a lot of money. It's not just a decision to charge more, it's a conscious project that takes a great deal of time and effort and talent. Most who set off down that path fail.
We can say that the customer is being defrauded because the literal product is the same, but that is to decide that the vast majority of people and huge portion of the economy is fake, and we should have strong priors that when we decide that everyone is an idiot we're engaging in an act of arrogance.
If Aella was stupid and lacked the cunning to build herself up, she wouldn't be a usable byword on this website, Tommy would have brought her up in the OP and we would have collectively gone "who?"
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The funny thing about those bottles of wine is I believe there have been a few cases of counterfeiter just mixing cheap stuff and labeling it different. And they got away with it for years until they were caught. So the drinkers didn’t know the difference.
My gut says the $4k hookers are a lot like the wine and it’s marketing + badly informed consumer with a lot of money.
If you're buying a bottle of wine at those prices, it's not for drinking, it's an investment. That's how counterfeiters can get away with it.
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In the actual case you're probably thinking of it was a fairly elaborate mixing operation, utilizing bottles of very good wine mixed with a variety of wines to match the flavor profile, and based on an experienced oenophile's knowledge of the expensive wines. Most of the cheap mixing wines were still wines I would consider very expensive to drink at my own table!
But regardless, marketing is part of the good from a supply and demand perspective, for both the wine and the gash. Sure, it all feels the same in the dark, but actually making the sale for that kind of money requires a sales effort. And if the kind of marketing in the pornography/escort space that Aella achieves were easy for many thousands of women in the pornography space to do, we wouldn't know who Aella was and be discussing and referencing her constantly on this website.
Yes it’s the case.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but I still probably place more emphasis on regulatory frictions limiting arbitrage than you. I would say in many ways it’s like the old floor traders at the NYSE or CBOT that made a lot of money but were sometimes like Iowa St or Fordham grads when now markets are ran by like some Chinese dude who won a math Olympiad. Each takes advantage of knowing flow to profit but the Chinese dude couldn’t just show up to the exchange back in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. Prostitution is basically not prosecuted unless it’s associated with other social disorder while even high end pimping is. The average hoe doesn’t know she should be reading AI doomerism and then throw a few quotes on a website to increase her rate 4-8x. There is only a few that fall into the niche which is kind of like a Fordham grad who had a cousin at the NYSE so started showing up there when he realized their was money.
In a parallel universe where the CIA decided they wanted intel on AI bros and lesser tech bros thru a prostitution ring in San Francisco and tasked me with setting it up with like a million in start-up capital and immunity from prosecution I think I could do it. And cause hoe deflation in San Francisco. I would hire some web guy to make me a bunch of websites; have some training academy where the girls read like SSC, some sci-fi, a few AI-doomer books; rent a bunch of apartments; spend some money prepping them at fancy restaurants. So yes I think you could just counterfeit a bunch of Aella’s crew. So to me the main barrier is regulatory that management is illegal. There are few girls who naturally: 1. Know to live in SF 2. Have a natural inclination to tech bro stuff 3. Have a physical attraction 7.5-8.5 4. Want to be whores. (3) is common enough. (4) common enough if the money is good. (1) and (2) are rare but I think could be taught.
To teach (1) and particularly (2) you have to know they are worth studying. I get the impression Aella was basically all 4 to begin with from where she decided to capitalise on an unplanned opportunity. All the hard work was done for her by happenstance (be attractive, be nerdy, live somewhere where horny nerds have buckets of disposable income, plus be a community of strident norms decouplers) and she just had to stoop and bend over in order to pick up the $3k bills that were lying in her lap.
How confident would you (or Aella) be that you could recreate her results if we crossed off the SF tech bro world that you already understand? What about sports bros, aristocracy bros, oil bros, government bros, etc? What about when that audience is averse to someone who is as indiscreet as Aella?
I think a lot of the women who are (3) and (4) play the same strategy as people on dating sites by trying to appeal to everyone and in doing so fail to distinguish themselves. They're trawler fishing in their crowded local bay instead of venturing out into deep water with a harpoon. If they tried to hunt for men in SF they'd probably think the place to find rich clients was in the shopping'n'restaurants district, not in the comments section of a blog arguing about the geopolitical importance of Taiwan or whatever.
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Sure if you had an infinite budget and ability to recruit, you could counterfeit Aella.
But I think the (5) on your list that is being underemphasized in most discussions of prostitution is: Able to mentally and physically endure and survive the ordeal of sex work while maintaining (2) and (3). Most strippers, porn stars, prostitutes flame out on drugs or alcohol or other self destructive behaviors; both because that kind of impulsivity is what lead them to the trade, and because of the pressures and traumas thereof. They have a short shelf life because of that.
I think it would be a rather low budget. I wouldn’t compare it to especially porn stars. That’s the very bottom of the market. They get paid like $1k a shoot and it’s online which is really stupid. (5) is probably more cultural. People joke that every girl in Miami is a sugar baby. It’s a joke because it’s a truism. So if you start from a different culture it’s not an issue. Getting them into tech boy culture and actually reading a dozen books would seem much harder than dealing with (5). But I think doable.
So I might have to do more Latina and Slavic basically the whitish country origins that are still poor so explicitly using beauty for resources is less culturally frowned upon. Russians and Ukrainians would be easier to coach up into nerd.
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As demonstrated by Bernard Black?
Death, Taxes, @HereAndGone2 hopping in to tell us that it's totally inexplicable that people value things she doesn't personally like. Said with all love and affection.
All we are is dust in the wind, my friend. Dust and ashes!
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
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