How Cable Tv Might Have Improved the Status of Women in India

2. How Cable TV might have improved the status of women in India

There are 5 chapters in the book with each chapter filled with umpteen number of stories, where results are presented based on the economic approach, looking at micro data, trying to ask questions and teasing out some answers. In a sense, this kind of thing actually makes economics interesting I guess. Its the same with stock market . Long term predictions(read anything more than a couple of months) are very difficult. Near term predictions are also not great too. If one looks at stock market data, almost everyone is dealing with the same starting point, univariate time series of stock prices, option quotes. You can do a low frequency, medium frequency or high frequency analysis. More and more I get exposed to data, I have a feeling that there is money to be made only in high frequency trades ..

he first chapter is about authors understanding demand curves of prostitutes. One of the challenges of asking questions about such topics is data. Everyone knows the more sensitive the topic is, the more difficult it is to procure data. Drugs, Violence, Sex are some of the things where getting data becomes a dangerous adventure. So, credit does go to Sudhir Venkatesh's hard work to actually get the data in the first place. Once you have some structured data , slicing and dicing is the fun part and here is where the authors excel is bringing out some interesting observations. In creating a narrative, the authors come out with a lot of aspects about women, women's lives, prewar prostitution etc. Here are some aspects mentioned in the book

It is hard to be a woman , be it developing countries or developed countries, say the authors. Practices such as breast ironing , abandoning girl childs in China, pay scale mismatch in corporate America etc. make it difficult to lead a woman's life

Prostitution has by far managed to be a woman's game( though things are changing pretty fast:) )

Prewar prostitutes were earning far more than the current street prostitutes. It is argued that one of the reasons could be the rise of premarital sex.

Whole lot of observations are based on the working paper, Empirical Analysis of Street-level Prostitution . It's abstract says the following :

Combining transaction-level data on street prostitutes with ethnographic observation and official police force data, we analyze the economics of prostitution in Chicago. Prostitution, because it is a market, is much more geographically concentrated than other

criminal activity. Street prostitutes earn roughly $25-$30 per hour, roughly four times their hourly wage in other activities, but this higher wage represents relatively meager compensation for the significant risk they bear. Prostitution activities are organized very