Internet Porn Stats
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 9:36 PM

Top Ten Reviews hosts a webpage that is chock full of statistics relating to pornography generally and internet pornography specifically. For instance, it seems that China is the largest market (in value terms) for pornography, though in per capita value terms, South Korea is dominant: porn "revenues" in South Korea exceed $500 per-capita per year, versus less than $50 in the US of A. (Revenues for porn may well be falling in the US.) Search engine requests for "sex" are most prevalent (in per capita terms?) in Pakistan, whereas South Africa is top of the table for "porn" searches. Among US cities, one stands out for naughty internet searching, leading the country in the "sex", "porn", and "xxx" categories. I am sure that by now you have guessed that this hotbed of perversion is, er, Elmhurst, Illinois.

Do you think that Elmhurst (located in the Northern District of Illinois) leads in those searches because some Elmhurst residents are trolling for potentially obscene material to pass along to the Feds? Or maybe there is one very active fellow who lives in Elmhurst?

Incidentally, I am uncertain about the provenance of many of the numbers reported on the Top Ten webpage, so I would take them with a grain of salt. (I am pretty confident about the "Elmhurst factor," however.)

Update: Please drop what you are doing right now and go watch Michael Pollan (of, among other things, The Omnivore's Dilemma) give a TED talk. Just in case you are new to this, TED talks are the best things on the web; while there, check out Freakonomics guru and general good fellow Steve Levitt. [I almost forgot: Pollan has been mentioned on Vice Squad before (surely his greatest honor) in part for the following quote: "As a result of the war against cannabis, Americans are demonstrably less free today." Levitt, too, has had his days in the Vice Squad sun.]

Labels: Illinois, internet, obscenity, pornography

 
I Can Quit Whenever I Want...
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 11:38 PM

... but nonetheless, a friend of Vice Squad reminds me that the big vice story of the week isn't that unfortunate medical marijuana case, but rather, the new evidence that the oldest profession really is the oldest profession. It appeared in the inaugural "Freakonomics" column in this week's New York Times Magazine by Stephen Dubner and justly renowned U of C colleague Steven Levitt. The evidence came to light in the research conducted by Yale economist Keith Chen with capuchin monkeys. Chen and his colleagues taught the monkeys to use money, coins that could be traded for food. But if any monkey could trade coins for food, then perhaps that monkey would trade something else to receive those valuable coins:

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys' true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)

This is a sensitive subject. The capuchin lab at Yale has been built and maintained to make the monkeys as comfortable as possible, and especially to allow them to carry on in a natural state. The introduction of money was tricky enough; it wouldn't reflect well on anyone involved if the money turned the lab into a brothel. To this end, Chen has taken steps to ensure that future monkey sex at Yale occurs as nature intended it.

As the friend of Vice Squad noted, the fact that the nascent sex market was squelched says as much about humans as it does about monkeys.

Labels: prostitution

 
Women, Men, and Vice
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 6:10 PM

On September 28, I linked to Tyler Cowen's post concerning a survey that indicated that
the typical gambler in US casinos is a female. Steve Levitt, economist par excellence at the
University of Chicago, informs me that an informal tally he conducted (in collaboration with
Sudhir Venkatesh) in Chicago suggests that the typical crack buyer is female. Are women
more vice-addled than men?

In general, it seems as if the answer is no. Measures of lifetime prevalence of illicit drug use in the
US indicate that men are some 22 percent more likely than women to have tried illicit drugs. (This
figure is calculated from Table H.14 here.) Men are more than three times as likely to be arrested
for drugs than are women, according to the FBI (see section IV of the 2001 Crime in the United States.)
For alcohol, women are again much less likely to indulge than are men. My suspicion is that drug and
alcohol abuse, as opposed to simple consumption, is even more skewed towards males. A report
prepared for the 1999 National Gambling Impact and Behavior Study indicated that problem
and pathological gambling is some 47 percent more common for men than for women. Indeed, cursory
observation suggests that women are not only likely to have fewer problems with self-control with
respect to vices than men do, but that the influence of women even serves as a bolster to the self-control
of men!

Labels: addiction, casino, cocaine, gambling

 
Stinging Chicago Drug Consumers
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 3:02 PM

In a column on the Commentary page of today's Chicago Tribune, Carol Marin
describes her experience accompanying Chicago police on a drug sting operation.
In the Harrison district, officers posed as drug sellers: "In less than four
hours, 102 buyers were in plastic handcuffs and on their way to lock-up."
Somehow the fact that there were two such stings in the same location in
the previous five days had not been enough to deter the would-be drug buyers.

Marin records the welcome news, that the homicide rate on the West Side
is down 75% from a year ago. But she also registers the whiff of
futility in the war on drugs, describing the buyers as "an ant army of
addiction" and sellers as "an endless stream of people willing to risk
prison to make big money."

(Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh found that the money
available to the typical street dealer in one Chicago gang actually isn't big
at all -- generally below the minimum wage, despite the risks of prison and
violence.)

Marin's conclusion is that the currently depressing equilibrium can be
overcome only by taking the money out of the drug market. Legalization
would be one means, perhaps a further ratcheting up of the drug war, with new
tactics, is another. On the latter, I would suggest that the previous twenty
years of ratcheting up the war on drugs don't leave great room for optimism.

Labels: Chicago, drugs, Prohibition