In the comments on my previous post contrasting minimum wage and prostitution, Sister Y argues that prostitution in fact has an externality. Some individuals find prostitution morally objectionable, and so they suffer mental costs when someone else hires a prostitute. The idea that we have preferences over each others actions, and that this can lead to conflicts between welfare analysis and various notions of liberty, is a longstanding issue in economics that owes much to Amartya Sen. However, I think the prostitution-as-externality argument is fairly easily resolved and doesn’t generate any conflicts between liberty and welfare analysis.

To illustrate, allow me to use characters from HBO’s Hung, which stars Tom Jane as middle-class, suburbanite, male prostitute Ray Drecker.

Say Ray’s friend Lenore wants to purchase Ray’s prostitution services and she values them at $400. But when Lenore does this it bothers Ray’s other friend Tonya. If the negative utility Tonya experiences is worth more than $400, then the market provides a mechanism for Tonya to satisfy her wants: she can pay Ray $401 not to sleep with Lenore.

You might argue that contracts aren’t complete enough to guarantee that Ray won’t sleep with Lenore anyway the moment Tonya turns her back. But what Tonya can buy from Ray for $401 is only an hour of not sleeping with Lenore, because that is what one hour of his time is worth. If she wants to pay Ray to never sleep with Lenore she has to pay the net present value of all of the future services.

For those who morally object when Ray sells himself to anyone, not just Lenore, this is a moot point because there are other clients anyway, so paying to not sleep with Lenore doesn’t accomplish much less prostitution. The point is that because prostitutes offer a flow of services Tonya has to pay Ray not to sleep with all of his potential clients if she wants him to not be a prostitute. Essentially she has to buy the entire flow of services.

This makes contracting much less simple: if you don’t like prostitution then you can hire the prostitute to do something else. In this way the presence of lots of people who object for any reason, moral or otherwise, to prostitution can drive down the quantity of prostitution services by bidding up their price. What this means is that markets are fully capable of internalizing the mental costs borne by those who dislike prostitution.

People will probably object that this is unbelievable, and that even if it happened once in a while, in the real world this would never be enough objectors to affect the quantity of prostitution. I think this is correct. After all, the objectors would have to value preventing prostitution at more than average rate of $300 an hour in order to outbid the existing buyers. But what this tells you is that the marginal utility gained from prostitution by consumers would vastly exceeds the marginal disutility to objectors.

I think objectors know. After all, market based solutions are possible and yet you never hear objectors push for anything but prohibition. This tells me that their willingness to pay is pretty low, and therefore so is their disutility.

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