If by “stigmatize selling X” you mean “refusing to sell X except for a price that is very high compared to what it gets on the market”, then of course [...] If you mean something else, please clarify.
I said “social stigma”, and I meant “social stigma”: the attitudes that make other people think less of you, on average, for taking X as a job than Y. My presumption is that that you’re basing your extremely low estimate of the job’s attractiveness on that stigma (there’s really nothing else to explain orders-of-magnitude levels of aversion); I, on the other hand, would expect it to have been priced into the market already, along with a number of other externalities like health and legal risk, and that the people considering the job are competent to evaluate it (which is really just another way of saying the same thing). These are the same factors that make unskilled labor in a steel mill command more money than unskilled labor in data entry, and sex isn’t magic.
(Bans can distort markets in unpredictable ways, but that’s why I used Nevada as an example.)
But that wasn’t even the important part of my post. The important part is that they are not you, neither in personality nor circumstances, and even if you believe that most people would find their career choice very aversive, it’s presumptuous in the extreme to declare it illegitimate (for example by assuming it must be the product of coercion) on that basis. And on that note...
are you a typical person in this regard?
...this is almost exactly the wrong question to be asking. Comparative advantage is a thing! If one person is willing and able to produce more value for money in a given role than another, that means nothing more or less than that they’re better suited to that role, at least in economic terms. There is absolutely no reason that a given job has to be attractive to a “typical” person. Mine isn’t.
I, on the other hand, would expect it to have been priced into the market already, along with a number of other externalities like health and legal risk, and that the people considering the job are competent to evaluate it (which is really just another way of saying the same thing)
If people are unwilling to sell X except for much more than the price other people people are willing to pay, then the market does indeed take that into account—it takes it into account by causing there not to be a market, except for the desperate.
That’s the whole point of my criterion.
If one person is willing and able to produce more value for money in a given role than another, that means nothing more or less than that they’re better suited to that role, at least in economic terms.
The question is not whether it is good for one person to be a prostitute, the question is whether it is good in general. If there are a lot of people like you, most prostitutes will be people with comparative advantage. If there are few people like you, most prostitutes will be the desperate, even though some will indeed be people like you. So it doesn’t just matter whether you exist at all, it also matters if you are typical.
I said “social stigma”, and I meant “social stigma”: the attitudes that make other people think less of you, on average, for taking X as a job than Y. My presumption is that that you’re basing your extremely low estimate of the job’s attractiveness on that stigma (there’s really nothing else to explain orders-of-magnitude levels of aversion); I, on the other hand, would expect it to have been priced into the market already, along with a number of other externalities like health and legal risk, and that the people considering the job are competent to evaluate it (which is really just another way of saying the same thing). These are the same factors that make unskilled labor in a steel mill command more money than unskilled labor in data entry, and sex isn’t magic.
(Bans can distort markets in unpredictable ways, but that’s why I used Nevada as an example.)
But that wasn’t even the important part of my post. The important part is that they are not you, neither in personality nor circumstances, and even if you believe that most people would find their career choice very aversive, it’s presumptuous in the extreme to declare it illegitimate (for example by assuming it must be the product of coercion) on that basis. And on that note...
...this is almost exactly the wrong question to be asking. Comparative advantage is a thing! If one person is willing and able to produce more value for money in a given role than another, that means nothing more or less than that they’re better suited to that role, at least in economic terms. There is absolutely no reason that a given job has to be attractive to a “typical” person. Mine isn’t.
If people are unwilling to sell X except for much more than the price other people people are willing to pay, then the market does indeed take that into account—it takes it into account by causing there not to be a market, except for the desperate.
That’s the whole point of my criterion.
The question is not whether it is good for one person to be a prostitute, the question is whether it is good in general. If there are a lot of people like you, most prostitutes will be people with comparative advantage. If there are few people like you, most prostitutes will be the desperate, even though some will indeed be people like you. So it doesn’t just matter whether you exist at all, it also matters if you are typical.