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An article is making the rounds on rat-adjacent twitter entitled "The Nerdy Escorts Cashing In On Silicon Valley’s AI Boom."
I can't bypass the paywall, but someone posted on X:
I know that aella, the famous rationalist whorelord, popularized this niche of pseudo-intellectual prostitutes appealing to rationalists and other tech nerds for extreme amounts of money. It's obvious that aella has become obscenely wealthy and gained a ton of social status from her pursuits, but I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.
I work a pretty boring, standard corporate marketing job, and apparently these prostitutes are taking home almost my entire after-tax yearly income in one weekend.
Even regardless of the moral aspect of the situation, the fact that a prostitute can make so much money is a huge slap in the face to people working hard for a living. That, combined with the fact that close to 18% of the economy is now in healthcare, has got me a bit depressed on the economy.
Also, Tyler Cowen had a bit of a viral moment yesterday saying he wouldn't be surprised if 15 to 20% of all jobs in the near future are elder care. This of course sandwiched in a talk where he insists AI is great and making jobs not losing them!
Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!
Either way, the optimism from the pundit class around AI and the economy is feeling more and more hollow to me by the day. If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society? How will things go otherwise without some sort of relatively radical disruption? I try not to be a 'doomer' about AI, but I'm increasingly finding it hard to be optimistic on the impact of it on society.
If it were an easy niche to fill, the price would be driven down. Aella is genuinely a uniquely talented person in her ability to occupy the two different niches involved at the same time. That's obvious when I listen to her on podcast appearances.
I have to disagree. In my experience I feel like the whore market is one of the least well arbitraged markets in the world.
One limit to arbitrage would be that market participants have a limited shelf-life to figure out the market and outsourcing to management (pimping) is much enforced criminally. And sharing information and tactics online seems more difficult than other markets.
I am going to assume the very best girls don’t even become whores. Steve Jobs wife would never become a whore because Stanford MBA and attractive makes it trivially easy for her to marry well. So I feel the supply side of the whore market can’t be power law because the far right tail just does marriage. Depending on your taste the far right tail of females are Tom Brady or Steve Jobs wives.
And then you have Miami. Where the strip clubs are basically brothels and like $500 gets you a girl hotter than these SF escorts. The price in Miami really is 5-10% of San Francisco. If you believe these girls and their $4k/hour claims.
So my guess is this is much more a story of market inefficiency. Some girls probably did find a magic marketing technique and location. And few hot girls want to live in San Francisco. So the high price is a lack of knowledge by other whores on marketing and a huge premium for having to live in San Francisco.
I believe a lot of this is just search costs. Whores don’t know how to market to tech nerds. Tech nerds don’t know how to find whores. The ones that know how to connect the two make a lot.
Listen I get all this, this all makes sense to me. What I'm saying is that the subset of women who are likely to become escorts don't get this and it doesn't make sense to them. Start talking to them about arbitrage and they'll fall asleep before you finish, in either sense.
You don't have to be a genius at economics to understand "Less hot girls are making more money than you in escorting while doing less. If you want to make more money, you just need move to where there are more rich, lonely, awkward guys." While I don't finish that fast, I'm pretty sure you don't need to elaborate much more for this to be within intellectual reach of anyone with an IQ of 95. Probably 90.
And I think the market situation tells us, clearly, that women with high enough IQ to comprehend and execute that plan, while also being willing to be prostitutes and prostitutes to nerds, are in short supply.
I am not convinced. Per google, the most expensive bottles of wine cost about half a million. This does not mean that there is a supply shortage of wine, merely that weird things happen when the uberrich engage in bidding wars. If the median price for an escort in SV was 10k$, 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.
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