EclectEcon

Economics and the mid-life crisis have much in common: Both dwell on foregone opportunities

C'est la vie; c'est la guerre; c'est la pomme de terre . . . . . . . . . . . . . email: jpalmer at uwo dot ca


. . . . . . . . . . .Richard Posner should be awarded the next Nobel Prize in Economics . . . . . . . . . . . .

Friday, April 01, 2005

Age and "Performance"- Enhancing Drugs

What performance-enhancing drug is this guy on [$ subscription required; thanks to Jack for the story]:

An 87-year-old American sex tourist who was arrested as he set off to have sex with two pre-teen girls in the Philippines was sentenced to 20 years in jail yesterday. ...

Seljan, a former country singer, was the first person to be convicted at trial of violating the 2003 Protect Act that punishes U.S. sex tourists irrespective of where the crime occurred.

He was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport in October, 2003, prior to boarding a flight to thePhilippines, where prosecutors said he was planning to have sex with two girls aged nine and 12.


The suspect was well-prepared, with US$8,000 in cash, 45 kilograms of chocolates, sex aids, 127 pornographic pictures and sexually explicit letters written to the two young girls. He also had maps to the girls’ homes.

I wonder what happened to the Los Angeles street price for hookers' services after this case broke. In a sense it is analogous to any other trade barrier that reduces the foreign supply and/or increases demand for the domestically produced good or service.

On a different note, I find it intriguing that some people are willing to pay so much for certain types of services when there are others that seem, at least to me, like close substitutes that are available for considerably lower prices. Quite likely the answer is that they are not close substitutes for some people.

100 pounds of chocolate??
 
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