He thinks that LA differs from Boston b/c of enforcement??? Has he ever been to either city? Boston is overflowing w/ Irish Catholics and LA is overflowing w/ scantily clad starlets.
Boston is the land of puritans. I can barely get a beer after midnight, never mind buy one at a gas station. I'm surprised we even have a bar on that graph.
I live in Atlanta and we have tons of Southern Baptists, yet we score pretty highly on the list. I'd actually argue that religious pressure may push more people towards this type of activity. eg. Ted Haggard
Religions attract the people that want to hide something, the best place to hide is right out in the open, they think they can go home pray and "their God" forgives them, so yes they use their religion to hide behind.
This analysis fails to take into account the amount of fake/scam/robo entries posted on Craigslist (their biggest problem today).
Several of my friends and I have been studying this in detail for a number of years now... We still haven't figured out why people post fake posts on Craigslist (especially in the personals section), however it is clear that there must be some incentive, as these spammers(?) have become increasingly elaborate. Many of them are ads, of course, however the amount of information that is exchanged before you learn this suggests that there is some sort of viral spam content harvesting occurring.
The author of this piece might find that to be an interesting follow-on study...
The spam gets verified addresses, and ones of a specific demographic.
The fake postings generally aren't listed as paid services--that is a much smaller pool of potential responders--but instead casual, no strings attached encounters.
This analysis has two major problems. The first is that housing ads are not a good proxy for total population using Craigslist; different cities tend to have different "velocities of housing" (how many times people move per year). He should have divided housing ads by some other housing supply metric and multiplied by population.
The second is that Craigslist is not the only channel for prostitution. There are high-end channels such as those used by Eliot Spitzer which may be more common in affluent cities, any "brothel"-type establishments that exist, and of course women on the street hollering at cars (the ability to do this may be severely hampered in colder climates).
Ok, to the first point, how do you determine the population of a city on craigslist? For example metro Atlanta has around 5 million people I think, while the actual city is ~600k. And some locations split out, such as LA and Orange County. I think the number of posts is both a good determination of population and usage rates. I'll agree though that it's not perfect, but I'm not sure there's an easy way to determine a "housing metric" for a craigslist city. It's hard to know the size of the surrounding area that uses the service.
As to the second point, the channels may differ, but a city that's affluent and embraces technology should see an proportionate increase on both categories, housing and erotic services. And LA has a great climate for "hollering at cars", while Boston should probably have the higher rate due to weather.
I'm certainly not going to argue that this analysis is anywhere near perfect, but I think you'd agree that Boston at 4% and LA at 24% is probably not just a matter of people moving more frequently.
Also, it assumes that usage of each category on craigslist increases at the same rate. Since housing and erotic services have strict separations between them on the site, it seems as if the network effects would be relatively (but definitely not completely) isolated to individual categories. Secondly, network effects increase the utility of the site logistically, so the ratios between different categories at a given point in time aren't meaningfully comparable.
This is absolutely true, however I did preface it with "The best I could come up with was the Housing category"
I'm completely open to a better metric. But as I said in the reply above, it's not easy to determine just how many people in an area use craigslist.
That being said, I'm not sure the two categories have such a hard seperation between the users. People on craigslist who use it for finding prostitutes probably also use it to find housing and vice versa.
Boy am I naive, did not know they ran prostitution thru Craigslists. I do know if you catch a businessman with a hooker he will go to great lengths to destroy your credibility and your life to protect his reputation and his hooker love. Believe me I accidently saw it and was stalked and harassed for 5 years.!!!
Wow did not know they ran prostitutes thru Craigslist but that makes so much sense now as to what happens there is so much organized crime hiding right out in the open, I learned the best place for criminals is out in the open...
Somehow I'm really happy that my ex hometown (Amsterdam) is not on that list because I have a dark brown feeeling it would not come out too well.
The fact that the author puts the differences between the various cities down to law enforcement suggests another take on the matter, a new baseline is needed from places where prostitution is legal.
