Sports and celebrity (salary and income)

 Basketball superstar Caitlin Clark recently went pro for a salary of $76,535.  What's going on?  The LA Times has the story of rags and riches...

Caitlin Clark is worth millions. Why will she only make $76,535 in base salary as a WNBA rookie?  By Chuck Schilken

"Clark, the Iowa phenomenon who set the NCAA career basketball scoring record and helped the women’s March Madness tournament reach all-time highs in TV ratings, was the No. 1 overall pick for the Indiana Fever in Monday’s WNBA draft.

"Her jersey sales are already through the roof. The league scheduled the Fever for 36 nationally televised games, more than any other team this season, several days before Clark officially became a member of the team. Likewise, tickets for opposing teams’ home games against Indiana saw a spike in interest (and price) long before draft night.

Clark will make $76,535 in base salary this year as a WNBA rookie, part of a four-year contract worth $338,056.

...

"Those salaries are the maximum allowed for rookies, as laid out in the most recent collective bargaining agreement between the WNBA and its players association. 

...

"As the WNBA pointed out in a statement emailed to The Times on Tuesday night, however, Clark will have the opportunity to make more money on top of her base salary.

“Caitlin Clark stands to make a half million dollars or more in WNBA earnings this coming season,” the statement read, “in addition to what she will receive through endorsements and other partnerships, which has been reported to already exceed $3 million.”

...

"In addition to the individual endorsement deals she has already secured, Clark will undoubtedly will have a stream of other lucrative opportunities come her way. BIG3 co-founder Ice Cube has offered Clark $5 million to become the first female player in his three-on-three basketball league.

"Still, it might come as a bit of a shock to learn how relatively little Clark and other star WNBA rookies will make in base salary, especially compared with their counterparts in other leagues. Like Clark, Victor Wembanyama was seen as a generational talent when he was selected No. 1 overall by the San Antonio Spurs in the 2023 draft. His four-year rookie contract is worth $55.2 million."

##########

Update:

 How Nike Won the Battle for Caitlin Clark  By Rachel Bachman, WSJ, April 19, 2024

"When it came to Clark, Nike looked even further into the future. The duration of the proposed contract, eight years, suggests that the brand sees not only long-term stardom potential, but truly global appeal. The next eight years, Nike executives reasoned, would give Clark a chance to represent the U.S. at three Olympic Games—this summer in Paris, 2028 in Los Angeles, and 2032 in Brisbane, Australia. (The U.S. roster for Paris won’t be announced until June or July.)

"Nike’s initial offer of $3.5 million a year, though an eye-popping number, didn’t initially come with a signature shoe. One possibility floated was that Clark would instead become the female face of the Kobe Bryant line, which relaunched in August 2023 to great fanfare.

"In its final offer to Clark, however, Nike upped its offer to include a signature shoe. That would give her the most lucrative and attractive shoe deal in women’s basketball—and yet another record for her collection."

Money Laundering

 Financial regulation plays a big role in law enforcement, by helping investigators to follow the money, which is often easier than following the crimes that generate the money. So, for example, drug dealers and others have trouble turning their income (which is often in cash) into bank accounts that can be used to buy the things that legal money can buy.  Money laundering involves turning ill got gains into reportable income.  Gambling, it turns out, offers some possibilities: if I come into the casino with some cash, and come out with some cash, it's hard to prove that I'm paying tax on more than my winnings.

Here's a story that touches on that, from the WSJ:

Cantor Fitzgerald Gambling Affiliate to Pay $22.5 Million to Settle Probes. CG Technology is said to have admitted aiding and abetting illegal gambling and money laundering   By Kate O’Keeffe and Alexandra Berzon

"Cantor Fitzgerald LP’s sports-betting affiliate has agreed to pay $22.5 million in penalties and forfeiture to the U.S. government in conjunction with its involvement in illegal gambling and money laundering, according to people familiar with the matter.

...

"The agreement comes as the U.S. Treasury and Justice Departments have been increasingly focused in recent years on potential money-laundering violations at casinos. The probes generally center on how the gambling companies allegedly help to facilitate money laundering or fail to report suspicious activities.

...

"Two people who were running their own illegal bookmaking operations elsewhere laundered money through Cantor as part of this system, the people said."

Depreciated currency

I'm flying home today from Argentina, where I took part in the TTS2022 international transplant conference.   I had to change dollars to pesos, which is made more complicated by the fact that Argentina has experienced persistently very high inflation.  But I feel on much more solid ground than if I had been in Venezuela, where inflation has wreaked havoc.

 David Klinowski recently finished a postdoc at Stanford and moved to Pitt. As a souvenir, he gave us this peacock, made by an artist from depreciated Venezuelan currency, which happens to have pictures of birds.  Persistent inflation has made this one of the high value uses of these old bills.

Here's a snippet of inflation data from the IMF: 

Venezuela: Inflation rate from 2012 to 2022 (compared to the previous year)

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In contrast to Venezuela, inflation in Argentina could be worse--it's less than 100% a year--double digits rather than 5 digits--although it's still among the highest in the world:

Argentina: Inflation rate from 2004 to 2027(compared to the previous year), with 2014-16 missing (and estimated going forward)

The search for tennis talent is unraveling

 It used to be that 11 year old professional tennis players were rare, but it looks like that's not the case any more. The NYT has the story:

Are the Next Global Tennis Stars Among These Tweens? The search for elite players is so competitive that IMG, the agency that once ruled tennis, is cultivating preteens to find the next prodigy  By Matthew Futterman

"The race to find the sport’s next stars has come to this: With eight-figure fortunes potentially at stake, agents and scouts are evaluating and cultivating players even younger than 10 who are just getting started in serious competition.

...

“Nobody wants to have a tournament for 11- and 12-year-olds,” said Max Eisenbud, who leads the company’s tennis division. “I’d rather wait, but the competition forced us into this situation.”

"For years, IMG’s agents collected future stars in two ways: Tweens and young teens (Maria Sharapova for example) either showed up at its academy in Bradenton, Fla., once the premier training ground in the sport, looking for one of the plentiful scholarships; or the agents showed up in Tarbes, France, for Les Petit As, the world’s premier tournament for players younger than 14. 

...

"in recent years, when Eisenbud and his colleagues made their annual trips to Les Petit As, they found that nearly all the most promising players had already signed contracts with other management companies, many of them well-funded boutique operations that were offering generous financial guarantees, sometimes stretching well beyond covering the roughly $50,000 annual cost for coaching and travel on the junior circuit.

"And so, in a sign of cutthroat times in tennis, IMG is aiming younger, even if prospecting preteen talent can be nearly impossible and highly fraught, risking increasing the pressure on children who already put plenty on themselves and, in some cases, carry the financial responsibilities for their struggling families.

...

"Eisenbud famously signed Sharapova when she was 11 years old after watching her hit for 45 minutes with an intensity and flawlessness he had never before seen. Carlos Alcaraz, who turns 19 on Thursday and is already the hottest young player in the men’s game, was deemed worthy of investment as a can’t-miss 11-year-old, too. Then again, Eisenbud was sure the first player he signed, Horia Tecau of Romania, was destined for greatness. Tecau became a top doubles specialist but never cracked the top 300 in singles.

...

 "Finding a future top 50 player from a country or a demographic group that has never produced a tennis star could be groundbreaking and incredibly lucrative."

Money and repugnance

 Readers of this blog are already familiar with the association between money and repugnance.  Check out this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic: "Are the best things in life free?"

"It'd be more accurate to say 'The Best Things in Life are Extremely Costly Plus You're Prohibited From Buying Them Directly With Money"

Ant financial

When I visited Hangzhou recently I learned a bit about Ant Financial, the offspring of Alibaba and the proprieter of AliPay.  Here's a story from the WSJ about how big they've grown, and the attention it is starting to bring them from Chinese regulators:

Jack Ma’s Giant Financial Startup Is Shaking the Chinese Banking System
Ant Financial is transforming how Chinese run their daily finances, drawing flak from big banks and warning shots from the government

"It handled more payments last year than Mastercard , controls the world’s largest money-market fund and has made loans to tens of millions of people. Its online payments platform completed more than $8 trillion of transactions last year—the equivalent of more than twice Germany’s gross domestic product.

"Ant Financial Services Group, founded by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, has become the world’s biggest financial-technology firm, driving innovations that let people use their phones for buying insurance as easily as groceries, enabling millions to go weeks at a time without using physical cash.

"That success is also putting a target on the company’s back. China, even more than the U.S., is now under pressure to reckon with the disruptive power of a financial-technology giant."

Usury and theology

At Aeon, Alex Mayyasi writes about the work of banker turned theologian David Miller:

Of money and morals
Moneylending has been taboo for most of human history. So how did usury stop being a sin and become respectable finance?

"Vedic law in Ancient India condemned usury, and rulers routinely capped interest rates from Ancient Mesopotamia to Ancient Greece. In Politics, Aristotle described usury as ‘the birth of money from money’, and claimed it was unnatural because money was sterile and should not ‘breed’.
...
"In the 4th century CE, Christian councils denounced the practice, and by 800, the emperor Charlemagne made the prohibition into law. Accounts of merchants and bankers in the Middle Ages frequently include expressions of anguish over their profits. In his Divine Comedy of the 14th century, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri put the usurers in the seventh circle of Hell..."

"The stigma against moneylending continued well into the 1500s. To understand it, think about your reaction to the idea of a bank making a loan to a business at a 5 per cent interest rate. No problem, right? Now compare that to how you’d feel if your mother lent you money on the same terms. In Biblical times, the typical loan was more like the second case – it wasn’t an arms-length transaction, but a charitable loan from a wealthy man to a neighbour who’d experienced misfortune or had nowhere else to turn. "

Blackmail has something in common with transactions that become repugnant when money is added

Blackmail isn't what I usually mean when I speak of a repugnant transaction, because it isn't a voluntary transaction that third parties wish to prevent, it's a crime that someone assaults someone else with. But, just as some praiseworthy transactions (like donating a kidney to someone who needs a transplant) can become repugnant when money is added (both demanding compensation and compensating the donor of a kidney for transplant is a crime almost everywhere), the crime of blackmail involves combining actions that are otherwise legal but that together are criminal.

For example, if someone knows something about you that you would like to conceal, it is quite often legal for them to reveal it to interested parties, or even in a biography of you they might write (e.g. your past arrests, affairs, political affiliations and contributions, etc.). It would also be quite legal for you to approach someone and commission them to write something about you, including something over which you might have editorial control. But if someone proposes to combine these things, by threatening to write bad things about you unless you pay him money, that is in many cases the criminal act of blackmail.

More on blackmail and it's subtleties (e.g. I can't demand that you pay me if you don't want me to reveal that you are a thief, but I could threaten to report you the police if you don't pay me for something you stole from me...) in this interesting column at the Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy:
Blackmail is surprisingly hard to define

Repugnant money in England

I've written a lot about repugnance and money, but never quite like this. Here's the Telegraph story on some new banknotes:
New £5 notes contain animal fat, says Bank of England, drawing anger from vegans and vegetarians

"Vegans and vegetarians have voiced outrage after it emerged the new £5 notes contain tallow, a substance made from animal fat...
...
"More than 1,700 people so far have signed a petitiondemanding that the substance is no longer used in the production of the currency. 

"The new £5 notes contain animal fat in the form of tallow. This is unacceptable to millions of vegans & vegetarians in the UK. We demand that you cease to use animal products in the production of currency that we have to use," the petition read."

Repugnance for money: The Other Paris, by Luc Sante

Paris is romanticized as the opposite of NY, and poverty as freedom from money, in this review in The Guardian of The Other Paris by Luc Sante

"“My book is a kind of love letter to the city as it was and before it got overtaken by money. Money, for me, may not immediately kill people in the way terrorism does, but it does certainly change the fabric of daily life in much deeper and more insidious ways. The terrorist may be defeated in 50 or 20 or 10 years, but money is going to be much harder to defeat.”

Do payments systems like bitcoin change which transactions are treated as repugnant?

Rod Garratt of the NY Fed and UC Santa Barbara explores the idea that distributed payment systems like Bitcoin might change the manner in which some transactions come to be effectively regarded as repugnant:

A Distributed Version of Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets

"But who decides what is repugnant? In democratic societies, these decisions are ultimately made by the lawmakers, who are influenced by their constituents. Of course, it’s possible that an influential minority could exert undue influence on this process, but let us, for the sake of argument, say that the process is perfectly democratic, so that acts deemed repugnant actually reflect the majority’s wishes. What this basically means is that, in a democratic society, classifying things as repugnant, or declassifying them, requires some form of public debate and consensus formation. 

Or does it? Instead of relying on laws that punish repugnant behavior, it is conceivable that individuals or institutions might intervene directly, by preventing the payments from occurring in the first place. For the most part, existing payment platforms do not impose restrictions on the types of transactions that they facilitate beyond the requirement that the transactions be legal. However, it is worth noting that in addition to requiring that transactions be legal, credit card companies also reserve the right to limit activity that they, at their own discretion, deem potentially harmful to their brands (see rules documents from Visa, Section 1.3.3.4, and MasterCard, Section 5.9.7). 

In the last few years, a new type of payment system has emerged: the distributed public ledger. This new technology facilitates payments in terms of virtual currencies, most notably Bitcoin. The Bitcoin protocol uses a “proof-of-work” process that decentralizes clearing and settlement. Agents, known as miners, compete to win the right to validate transactions. Without delving into details, the important aspects are that (1) a miner’s probability of winning the right to process transactions is proportional to how much computing power he or she assigns to the task and (2) miners can choose which transactions to validate. This means that a miner can avoid validating transactions that he or she considers repugnant and that, if a majority of miners agreed, such transactions can be significantly delayed or even prevented. 

Virtual currencies like Bitcoin create a new opportunity for expressing views on repugnance that allows individuals to impede or even prevent transactions that they deem repugnant."

...

"There is at least one example where something like this has already occurred. Satoshi Dice is an online gaming site that uses bitcoin as its primary form of payment. In the spring of 2013, members of the Bitcoin community started to complain about these transactions and reportedly started excluding them from the transaction blocks that they were processing."

Private and public healthcare in Israel

In Israel, there is disagreement over the right ways to mix publicly funded health care and private insurance. Here's the story from Haaretz:
In dramatic decision, private medical care banned in Israel's public hospitals
Although committee headed by Health Minister Yael German banned private services, medical tourism is still allowed, though it is unclear to what extent.
By Roni Linder-Ganz | 16:39 25.06.14 |

"Private medical services, popularly known by the Hebrew acronym sharap, would no longer be permitted at government hospitals if the recommendations of a committee headed by Health Minister Yael German are adopted."

Here's an ungated report: Health Minister: No Private Care in Public Hospitals  

Health Minister (Yesh Atid) Yael German announced on Wednesday, 27 Sivan 5774 that after about a year of deliberation and meetings, the committee she headed has decided private “Sharap” (שר”פ – שרות רפואה פרטי) medical care would not be offered in the nation’s public hospitals.

German is a supporter of the Sharap service and during the months of meetings she tried to persuade her colleagues to vote in favor of the option, a move she feel would improve the nation’s healthcare as well as shorten waiting lines for appointments with experts.

However the committee decided against it for it believes it is better for the masses to place more of the health care burden on the government instead of the private citizen.

Globes reports that “supporters of private medicine included German herself; Penina Koren, the former head of her office in the Herzliya Municipality; National Economic Council chairman Prof. Eugene Kandel; health economist Prof. Jacob (Kobi) Glazer; Ministry of Health director general Prof. Arnon Afek; and Israel Medical Association Secretary General Leah Wapner. Opponents included former Ministry of Health deputy director general Prof. Gabi Bin-Nun, Prof. Leah Achdut from the Ruppin Academy, Ministry of Finance deputy budgets director Moshe Bar Siman Tov, and Adv. Adi Niv-Yaguda, a specialist in medical law”. If the Sharap plan would have been approved, it would have permitted choosing a specialist in a public hospital, which would also result in a shorter waiting period. Sharap is paid for by the patient, who may or may not have additional healthcare insurance to cover it. For example, a private visit today in Hadassah Hospital with a senior specialist under Sharap costs 1,150 NIS. Kupat Cholim Maccabi will reimburse a patient if s/he sees a senior physician whose name appears on the approved list in the amount of 80% or 616 shekels, whichever is lower.

Opponents feel that the top doctors are taking private patients during the hours they should be seeing HMO patients and therefore, those unable to pay for private medical care are left out in the cold with substandard care and long lines for an appointment or procedure.

-

A few years ago I blogged about a similar debate concerning Britain's National Health Service:

Monday, May 31, 2010

Money and medicine in Britain's National Health Service

The London Times reports NHS bars woman after she saw private doctor 

The evolution of eBay

Once eBay was primarily an auction site...a story by Jeff Himmelman in the NY Times Sunday magazine brings us up to date: EBay’s Strategy for Taking On Amazon

"Most people think of eBay as an online auction house, the world’s biggest garage sale, which it has been for most of its life. But since Donahoe took over in 2008, he has slowly moved the company beyond auctions, developing technology partnerships with big retailers like Home Depot, Macy’s, Toys ‘‘R’’ Us and Target and expanding eBay’s online marketplace to include reliable, returnable goods at fixed prices. (Auctions currently represent just 30 percent of the purchases made at eBay.com; the site sells 13,000 cars a week through its mobile app alone, many at fixed prices.)

Under Donahoe, eBay has made 34 acquisitions over the last five years, most of them to provide the company and its retail partners with enhanced technology. EBay can help with the back end of websites, create interactive storefronts in real-world locations, streamline the electronic-payment process or help monitor inventory in real time. (Outsourcing some of the digital strategy and technological operations to eBay frees up companies to focus on what they presumably do best: Make and market their own products.) In select cities, eBay has also recently introduced eBay Now, an app that allows you to order goods from participating local vendors and have them delivered to your door in about an hour for a $5 fee. The company is betting its future on the idea that its interactive technology can turn shopping into a kind of entertainment, or at least make commerce something more than simply working through price-plus-shipping calculations. If eBay can get enough people into Dick’s Sporting Goods to try out a new set of golf clubs and then get them to buy those clubs in the store, instead of from Amazon, there’s a business model there.

A key element of eBay’s vision of the future is the digital wallet. On a basic level, having a ‘‘digital wallet’’ means paying with your phone, but it’s about a lot more than that; it’s as much a concept as a product. EBay bought PayPal in 2002, after PayPal established itself as a safe way to transfer money between people who didn’t know each other (thus facilitating eBay purchases). For the last several years, eBay has regarded digital payments through mobile devices as having the potential to change everything — to become, as David Marcus, PayPal’s president, puts it, ‘‘Money 3.0.’’'
...
"The best current example of the digital wallet’s promise, according to many in Silicon Valley, is Uber, a digital platform that connects riders and drivers. You enter your credit-card information into the Uber app once, and then every time you want to use it, the app knows where you are and shows you how many cars are nearby and how soon one can be available. You order with one touch on a mobile screen, and a text lets you know a driver is on the way and then another tells you when he’s near. He greets you by name, you tell him where you want to go and then, when you are dropped off, there is no further exchange — no tip, no receipt, no signing anything. The app takes care of all that for you. Uber didn’t change anything about the nature of cars or how they are driven. It just figured out how to use data and technology to make what was out there work much more efficiently. (EBay, through its acquisition of the company Shutl, has begun to exploit a similar inefficiency in the spare capacity of courier companies.)
...
"‘‘It’s not about payment,’’ Jack Dorsey, a founder of Square, a PayPal competitor, says. ‘‘It’s about identity. And it’s about the experience that a merchant can create, which is what actually builds loyalty. We believe that it’s important that the technology, the mechanics of payments, actually fade away to the background. They disappear completely.’’ After helping found Twitter in 2006, Dorsey became chief executive of Square in 2009. Its initial innovation was the Square Reader, a small device that plugs into the headphone jack of a smartphone or tablet and enables anyone, anywhere, to process a credit-card payment. (PayPal now has a similar reader.) In 2011, Square introduced what would become known as the Square Wallet, an app that links to a credit card (as Uber does) and allows consumers to pay either by holding their phones up to a scanner or, in some cases, simply by having the phones on in their pockets. Dorsey talks about how cool it is to get your coffee without having to do anything, but he also emphasizes what it means for the merchants. ‘‘The seller gets this very interesting tool,’’ he says. ‘‘They can recognize me when I walk in.’’ 

Design of bitcoin

Here's a nice tutorial by Michael Nielsen on some of the main design elements of the market for bitcoins (and other digital currency): How the Bitcoin protocol actually works

Here is the original bitcoin paper:
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto

Counting people as a repugnant transaction

This week's Torah portion, Ki Tissa (Exodus 30:11-34:35) has some well known parts (the Golden Calf and the civil war that followed when Moses returned; you shouldn't boil a kid in its mother's milk...), but it starts with a census. And the census is described as follows (JTS translation)

"When you take a census of the Israelite people according to their enrollment, each shall pay the Lord a ransom for himself on being enrolled, that no plague may come upon them through their being enrolled."

The "ransom" is described as a half shekel.  You could read this as a tax.  But the Rabbinical commentaries expand on this in a number of ways, and one of them says that while it's ok to count coins, it isn't ok to count people, since a person can't/shouldn't be reduced to a number.

This makes census taking a very unusual repugnant transaction. Many non-repugnant transactions are rendered repugnant by adding money (think of kidney donation, which is almost universally applauded, versus kidney sales, which are widely illegal). Census taking is one of the rare examples of a repugnant transaction rendered non-repugnant by adding money, and counting the coins.

Money and medicine in Britain's National Health Service

The London Times reports NHS bars woman after she saw private doctor

"A WOMAN has been denied an operation on the NHS after paying for a private consultation to deal with her severe back pain.
Jenny Whitehead, a breast cancer survivor, paid £250 for an appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon after being told she would have to wait five months to see him on the NHS. He told her he would add her to his NHS waiting list for surgery.
She was barred from the list, however, and sent back to her GP. She must now find at least £10,000 for private surgery, or wait until the autumn for the NHS operation to remove a cyst on her spine. "

The managing of waiting lists for scarce resources is a tough business.

Informal money transfer networks: "hawala"

The informal money transfer system known as Hawala (or hundi) is in the news with the arrest of three Pakistani men in New England who are believed to have provided funds to the Times Square bomber. The Boston Globe reports Possible ties to murky finance system examined
"An informal money-exchange network known as “hawala’’ — a centuries-old system that operates outside conventional banking networks — is at the center of the investigation into three Pakistanis arrested Thursday in Massachusetts and Maine with alleged ties to the suspect in the failed Times Square bomb plot, law enforcement officials said yesterday."
...
"Hawala, which originates from the Arabic word for change or transform, is a practice that predates modern banking systems and has been around for centuries. There are believed to be thousands of hawala brokers operating in the United States, and they are not necessarily operating outside US laws if they register with the US Department of Treasury. Many don’t, however, operating more like black-market, cash-based versions of Western Union.
Relying on an informal network of brokers who use designated couriers, the networks are used to transfer money in relatively small amounts in and out of developing nations where modern financial systems are scarce, such as in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Transactions often can be completed within 24 hours and at a lower cost than a traditional wire transfer or bank draft that could take as long as a week and require official paperwork.
Hawaladars, as the brokers are known, often operate out of cash-intensive businesses such as restaurants, convenience stores, or gas stations, the officials said."

The informal nature of the transfers, which circumvent banks and regulated record keeping, and the fact that the broker on one end doesn't know the customer on the other end, have made the hawala system a concern for law enforcement involving money laundering. Here's a report from Interpol: The hawala alternative remittance system and its role in money laundering

Your penny for my two cents: micropayments on the web

Even if you are prepared to pay a penny for my thoughts, the transaction costs would likely deter you, unless the payment can be made automatically. This is the problem facing micropayments in particular, and it makes it hard for newspapers to charge for news.

Harvard's Neiman Journalism Lab reports on Google's marketplace proposal, which would allow customers to maintain a Google account that could be billed without requiring the customer to maintain accounts or reveal information to each content provider: Google developing a micropayment platform and pitching newspapers: “‘Open’ need not mean free”

"It's like fishing..." Indoor prostitution in Taiwan and Rhode Island

Taiwan has begun a process of legalizing prostitution : "Taiwan's cabinet will issue regulations within six months, when new regulations take effect, covering locations in Taiwan approved for prostitution."

"It's like fishing," Su said. "The activity may be legal, but in some places you can't do it."

"Taiwan outlawed prostitution 11 years ago, but older sections of the capital Taipei still teem with underground sex workers in bars and night clubs on the upper floors of high-rise buildings."

"Taiwan is the latest place to legalise prostitution. New Zealand allowed brothels to operate freely in 2003, when parliament narrowly voted to overturn 100-year-old sex laws. A court in Bangladesh decriminalized the trade in 2000, but for women only."

And in Rhode Island, things may be moving in the opposite direction.
The Providence Journal has a story about how indoor prostitution was decriminalized in Rhode Island (perhaps inadvertently, the story suggests) as part of legislation aimed at strengthening laws against public solicitation: Behind closed doors: How R.I. decriminalized prostitution. (HT: MR). The story goes on to describe ongoing attempts to reverse that:

"This year, as they have for the last three years, several state lawmakers are pushing to rewrite the 1980 law. A bill that passed the House earlier this month clearly states that anyone who engages in sex for money is guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. The bill is awaiting a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee. " (emphasis added)

Money is at the root of a lot of repugnance.

Queuing to tee up at the Bethpage State Park Black Course

The USGA 2009 US Open golf tournament begins tomorrow, June 18. The host golf course is the Bethpage State Park Black Course. You have to be pretty skilled to qualify ("Entries are open to professional golfers and amateur golfers with an up-to-date men’s Handicap Index® not exceeding 1.4 under the USGA Handicap System™. ")

But if you just want the experience of playing on the same course as the top pros, the Black is a public golf course. You could just sign up for a tee time. Or could you? It turns out not to be quite so easy.

Just as markets can unravel, so can queues. A reliable symptom is people waiting on line overnight, especially if they have to wait for more than one night. Getting a tee time at this particular famous public (i.e. not rationed by price) golf course on Long Island seems to qualify: Parking All Night at Bethpage, Hoping to Drive. Note the well developed rules for regulating the queue, which include a rule meant to prevent the substitution of capital for leisure.

"Bethpage has five public golf courses: Black, Red, Blue, Yellow and Green. But the bulk of tee times for the courses, particularly the famed Black, can be hard to get through the phone-reservation system, which has 70,000 registered users. At least one company floods the system each night with hired callers, then resells the times as part of golf packages.
Yet there is one way to ensure a time at Bethpage Black, a major-championship course with $50 fees during the week, $60 on weekends, and double that for non-New Yorkers: get to the parking lot and spend a night. Maybe two. Maybe more."
...
"A sign there explains the complex rules of the “Walk Up Car Line.” Most important is that someone must be at the car for part of every hour. For the Envoy, on this Saturday afternoon, that person was Steve Atieh, 25, from Basking Ridge, N.J., who planned to play the Black course with two brothers and a friend.
They teed off 39 hours after arriving, about 11 hours after their car battery died while the radio broadcast a Yankees game."
...
"Steve Tomasheski was sitting in space No. 3 when someone offered $1,000 for it. He declined, afraid to disappoint his playing partners. Please do not tell his wife."
...
"At 7 p.m., Michael Azzue, an assistant supervisor at Bethpage, arrived in a cart. “Who’s No. 1?” he said, shouting. Azzue attached a plastic bracelet around Atieh’s wrist. At least one person from every car must be present when a supervisor arrives between 6 and 9 p.m. That person must be one of the golfers the next morning, to prevent hiring a nongolfer to do the waiting, which used to happen."

Apparently it is repugnant to pay someone to wait in line for you, although the story suggests that there is some demand for this, and people who arrive a little late (and before the monitoring kicks in) sometimes buy places from early arrivals.

Endnote: "Success has many fathers...", here's a story on a dispute about who really deserves the credit for designing the course. (Credit is a subject worth a discussion in its own right. In my experience, success in complex design projects often does have many fathers, with lots of people contributing in critical ways.)