Everyone Can Potentially Benefit

Everyone can potentially benefit from the creation or addition of economic value. However, each participant in the process usually has available to one various actions that increase one’s own gain, while lowering the others’ gain by a greater amount. The only exceptions are situations involving simultaneous exchange of goods or services of immediately verifiable attributes and qualities, but these are a small subset of all economic interactions. In most situations, the participants have opportunities to supply defective goods, shrink on the job, renege on payment, and so on. The term “opportunism” has been coined for this whole class of actions that tempt individuals but hurt the group as a whole. Problems also arise with property rights. If no mechanisms—governmental or non-governmental—exist to deter theft, then any one person can wait for someone else to create property or produce output and then steal it; this usually takes less effort than creating the property or the product oneself. Some may even extort money from others by making threats to destroy their property. Anticipation of opportunism, theft, or extortion constitutes a strong disincentive to making potentially valuable investments or entering into mutually beneficial contacts in the first place. Therefore if market economies are to succeed, they need a foundation of mechanisms to deter such privately profitable but socially dysfunctional behaviors, and thereby to sustain adequate incentives to invest, produce, and exchange. In other words, markets need the underpinning of institutions of economic governance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Economist have always recognized the need for governance. However, until relatively recently they assumed that the government, specifically the institution and machinery of the state’s law, provided the needed governance. Criminal law, while it has major non-economic functions, also serves to deter theft and some forms of economic fraud. Civil law had economic aspects centrally in it concerns. Contract law can be said to be mainly for the governance of economic activity; laws of tort and liability pertain to contracts as well as non-contractual relationships, both mainly in the economic sphere. Even the most libertarian economists, who deny the government any useful role in most aspect of the economy, allow that making and enforcing laws that give clear definitions of property rights, and ensuring adherence to voluntary private contracts, are legitimate and indeed essential functions of government, in addition to national defense. The government’s major functions must be to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow-citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets. There seems universal agreement in traditional economies that the framework of law is a necessary condition for a market economy to succeed. When the framework of the law fails, people often times become opportunistic and commodify their bodies. When it comes to an analysis of women’s involvement in prostitution, some scholars insist that prostitution is a form of gendered victimization whereby women’s impoverished status in society forces them into a life of prostitution and make their exit unrealistic. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Others view prostitution as a gendered survival strategy whereby entrepreneurial women utilize their involvements in the sex market as a means of achieving financial and personal independence. Interviews with twenty-one Sacramento streetwalker’s life histories reveal the presence of both gendered victimization and gendered survival strategies. Women experience their prostitution roles in contradictory ways; they see it as both a means of survival and a threat to their survival. Moreover, these women have a number of coping strategies that they invoke en route to accommodating or making sense of this inherent contradiction. The women, in this study, who are prostitutes adopt a series of interchangeable identities. Sometimes they stress the financial aspects of their work and talk about “prostitutes-as-workers” or “prostitutes-as-commodified bodies.” These mindsets construct men as sources of income that could be exploited via pleasures of the flesh. When speaking about the pimp role, the women often invoke a “prostitution-as business-woman” or “prostitute-as-loving-partner” identity. These two competing World views construct men as a liability or expense, with the first rejecting the need for a pimp and the second rationalizing his presence in their lives. Still other times, the women invoke a “prostitution-as-victim” or “prostitute-as-survivor” mentality. These discussions frame men as a source of risk and stress that the prostitute must constantly confront or negotiate their antics. Women who are prostitutes, act and think in a seemingly chaotic World, by constantly struggling to impose and reimpose a sense of order or personal understanding to an inherently contradictory lifestyle. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Centuries of prostitution-related research permit researchers to be fairly clear about one thing. Women who get and stay involved in prostitution tend to be women whose lives are torn apart by the aggregate effects of poverty and who often become homeless, physically, sexually, and emotionally abused by parents, partners or boyfriends, grew up in state care and in institutions and have had histories of absconding from foster placements and children’s homes. Many have had drug and alcohol problems that compound the social and material adversity that they face. Other have already been in trouble with the law for petty property offenses. And yet research also tells another tale. Whilst poverty may drive women into prostitution, it is through prostitution that many women are able to secure a degree of control and stability within their personal and economic lives. Involvement in prostitution present women with the opportunity to combine child care with full time work (id est, prostitutes can chose their working hours, can work from home and can move in and out of work a they desire or need). It provides them with relatively higher amounts of income than they might otherwise have obtained. Hence it is that prostitutes have been talked about as “economic entrepreneurs” and prostitution as the resistance to relative poverty and economic dependency on men—situations created by women’s exclusion from the labor market. Of course, recognizing both of these research tales raises some very interesting question. Chief amongst these are: what are the contradictions inhere in involvement in prostitution? What type of problems does sustained involvement in prostitution present to the women so involved? How are these problems and/or contradictions accommodated (id est made sense of)? #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

The following draws on research data that was collected in the City of Sacramento towards the quarter century mark of the new millennium. The research project investigated and theorized the conditions in which it was possible for women’s sustained involvement in prostitution. The story told here is both a condense version of that larger story and a description of the various ways in which women experienced their involvement in prostitution and the symbolic landscape that helped them understand the choices they made. Prostituting, as in the activity of selling sex, is above all else an economic activity: as with any economic activity, personal motivation is usually very clear—the desire for money. However, involvement in prostitution is much more then merely about money, if only because being involved in prostitution means being embroiled in activities that are potentially risky, quasi-legal and certainly criminalized. Most of the interviewees in study discussed their involvement in prostitution as the opening of future possibilities for them as women in the face of ever-mounting social and material difficulties. Prostitution was seen as a way to survive: poverty, housing difficulties, and violent relationships that were often the result of rejecting living a life that left them dependent on specific men (fathers, husbands, or boyfriends) or on state welfare benefits. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

In common with other working class women, the respondents had difficulty earning enough money to support themselves. They had few, if any educational qualifications, marketable skills or labor market experience. When they could find work (and only 14 had), they were employed in the low-paid unskilled service sector or unskilled retail sector. Thirteen women had excluded themselves from the labor market altogether. Many of the women simply stated: “no one would employ me.” Removing oneself from the formal labor market or failing to maintain an “ordinary” working history can have profound effects. For these women, it left them with three choices: they could become dependent on state welfare benefits, dependent on particular men, or provide themselves with income in ways that are typically illegally criminogenic. Independence and the rejection of dependency was the central theme in all interviews—especially when talking about violent relationships. Most women explained their involvement in prostitution as being bound up with their rejection of being dependent on husbands, fathers, boyfriends, or state welfare benefits. Those women who grew up in Local Authority Care rejected dependence on a state-structured care system. Others attributed their involvement in prostitution to the need to “sort out” pressing financial problems, multiple debt and so on and when asked, it was precisely their rejection of being dependent on specific men (who were abusive or who did not provide economically or who had become the answer, because it often precipitated an immediate financial crisis. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

In general, these women constructed the dependency they experienced in their childhood pasts or in their adult intimate relationships as the cause of the violent abuse, sexual abuse, neglect and/or restrictions that they experienced. By the women’s own accounts, to be economically and socially independent was the means by which they could avoid any future abuse. The respondents talked about their involvement in prostitution as being a means of securing their future economic and social survival. As working class women, they lived within a social and material context where their survival was, generally, contingent on particular men, the state or casual part-time low-paid employment. Given that these specific women had also rejected ways of living that left them dependent on someone or something else, involvement in prostitution was seen not simply as an economic activity, but more importantly as a survival strategy that would enable them to live the lives they wanted to, to provide for themselves and any dependents they might have and to fashion a new better future for themselves in the face of ever decreasing legitimate opportunities in their present. Involvement in prostitution also came to be seen by these women as a trap within which their survival was threatened. Each women commented that being involved in prostitution had furthered her impoverishment, dramatically heightened her likelihood of being the victim of sexual and/or physical assault and increased her dependence on men (who, as pimps, were often violent). #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

The women discussed the tremendous economic risks inherent in engagement in prostitution regardless of whether they made the kind of money that allowed them to sort out their problems, sign off the social security register, obtain housing and leave their male partners. Specifically, they spoke of the great costs incurred through working such as the financial investments needed (for example, buying clothes and condoms, renting a flat, purchasing a mobile phone and paying for advertising). While it is true that many people have new expenditures when starting new work, for these women, the extra financial burdens involved in prostitution came at a time when their lives were already marked by extreme poverty and housing problems. In addition, however, working from the streets brought with it its own unique financial problems and risks. All but two of the respondents had been convicted of a prostitution-related offense—typically loitering or soliciting. In most cases, the convictions had been punished with fines. This change in sentencing lead to an increase in the number of convictions and in the levels of fines which had the perverse result that more, not fewer, women were sent to prison not for prostitution-related offense, but for non-payment of fines. Few of the interviewees could remember exactly how many times they had been arrested or the precise level of fines they either still had to pay or had paid in the course of their involvement in prostitution. However, my own observations in the court suggested fines tended to be in the region of approximately $100 to $200 per charge and that women often had three or more charges against them each time they went to court. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Finding women involved in prostitution for their prostitution-related offenses is paradoxical. Many of them simply did not have the financial resources to pay their fines. The obvious irony is that the criminal justice system, itself, created the conditions that both justified these women’s continued involvement in prostitution as well as trapped them within it. Perhaps the most dramatic way in which involvement in prostitution came to be understood as a form of gendered victimization was in their experience of the practice of pimping—a practice which profoundly increased both their poverty, their homelessness and their likelihood of being victims of violence. All but two of the women had been pimped. Thirteen women recalled having most of their money taken from them under the threat of violence. All but two of the women had been pimped. Thirteen women recalled having most of their money taken from them under the threat of violence. They were left only with a “subsistence” allowance to get them through each day. Lois (aged 21) recalled being given only $5.00 per day. Ruthie (age 25) talked about having only $10.00 each day in order to buy condoms and cigarettes. In terms of violence, all of the women who had been pimped talked about regular episodes of violence. They recounted their fears of being murdered or of being punched, stabbed, raped or even shot by their pimps. One of the consequences was that the women believed that being pimped was inevitable and could not be escaped. All spoke of the impossibility of “just not giving him any money.” Too much was at stake. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

Threatened with violence, controlled through housing and debt, often cut off from family and friends, the women believed that resistance was futile. Katrina (aged 20) summarized the interconnections between these issues. “We’re not getting no money out of it. The only way we’re going to get money is if we hide it. And if we get found out—the beatings! We usually get found out.” Risk pervades the life of most prostitutes and non-prostitute women in the first quarter of the twenty-first century of Sacramento. For prostitute women, however, the manner in which they negotiated the risk they encountered in their struggle to survive has led to their involvement. Conventional economic theory does not underestimate the importance of law; rather, the problem is that it takes the existence of a well-functioning institution of state law for granted. It assumes that the state has a monopoly over the use of coercion, and that the state designs and enforces laws with the objective of maximizing social welfare. Moreover, until the last 30 years or so, that is, until economics recognized the ubiquity and importance of information asymmetries and transaction costs, the usual implicit assumption was that the law operated costlessly. This simple view of law made it possible to achieve faster progress in the research on the economic forces of supply and demand, and of their equilibration in the markets; therefore it was a useful abstraction in its time. However, its shortcomings soon hinder rather than help the economic analysis of markets and limit its usefulness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Only advanced countries in recent times come anywhere near the economist’s ideal picture, in which the government supplies legal institutions that are guided solely by concern for social welfare and operate at low cost. In all countries through much of the history, the apparatus of state law was very costly, slow, unreliable, biased, corrupt, weak, or simply absent. In most countries this situation still prevails. Markets with such weak underpinnings of law differ greatly from those depicted in conventional economic theory. Deficiencies of the law are most acute in less-developed countries (LDCs) and in transition economies. To further highlight this illustration, there are more than 25 million cases pending before the courts in India, and even if no new ones are filed, it will take 324 years to clear the backlog. Laws in many transition economies are a façade without a foundation. Recent assessment of the effectiveness of the legal system in post-Russia differ among Western observers, but a fair assessment is that while the Arbitrazch court system created to handle commercial disputes has begun to function reasonably well in handing down verdicts, getting these verdicts enforced remains highly problematic, especially for smaller enterprises. Similar situations exist in other transition economies in Eastern Europe and in Vietnam. Of course economic activity does not grind to a halt because the government cannot or does not provide adequate underpinning of law. Too much potential value would go unrealized; therefore groups and societies have much to gain if they can create alternative institutions to provide the necessary economic governance. They attempt to develop, and sometimes succeed in developing, such institutions of varying degrees of effectiveness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

These include self-protection or hired professional protection for property rights, networks of information transmission, and social norms and punishments for contract enforcement. Indeed, an extreme version of the Coase Theorem says that everything works out in the best feasible way. Even if government is costly, the least-cost method will get chosen from among the available institutions, whether it be state law of a private alternative. The emergence of a state or government is itself endogenous, and will occur if, and only if, it is the most efficient mode of governance. However, even without going that far, we can recognize that societies will attempt to evolve other institutions, albeit imperfect ones, to underpin their economic activity when state law is missing or unusable. In other words, governmental provision of legal institutions is not strictly necessary for achieving reasonable good outcomes from markets. Passivity caused by wrong ideas of humility and self-abasement. The self-actualized consents, when accepting “death,” to let it be carried out in a “nothingness” and a “self-effacement” which gives one no place for proper and true self-estimation whatsoever. If the self-actualized accepts the self-depreciation suggested to him and created by psychopathological offenders, it brings an atmosphere of hopelessness and weakness about one, and one conveys to others a spirit of darkness and heaviness, sadness and grief. One’s spirit is easily crushed, wounded, and depressed. One may attribute the case to conduct disorder, without being aware of any specific example of conduct disorder in one’s life; or one may even look upon one’s “suffering” experience as “vicarious” suffering for the Church. However, an abnormal sense of suffering is one of the chief symptoms of deception. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

In contrast to the true elimination of pride and all the forms of conduct disorder arising from it, the counterfeit caused by deception may be recognized by the self-actualized obtruding one’s self-depreciation at moments most inopportune, with painful perplexity to those who hear it; a shrinking back from service for God, with inability to recognize the interests of the kingdom of Christ; a laborious effort to keep “I” out of sight, both in conversation and actions, and yet which forces the “I” more into view in an objectionable form; a deprecatory, apologizing manner, which gives opportunity to the “World-rulers of darkness of this World” to instigate their subjects to crush and put aside this “not I” person, at moments of strategic importance to the kingdom of God; an atmosphere around such a one of weakness, darkness, sadness, grief, lack of hope, easily wounded touchiness. All these many be the result of a believer “willing,” in some moment of “surrender to death,” to accept an effacement of his true personality—but which God requires as a vessel for the manifestation of the Spirit of God, in a life of fullest cooperation with the Spirit of God. This believer, by his wrong belief and submission to psychopathological offenders, suppressed into passivity a personality which could not and was not meant to “die”; and by this passivity he played into the hands of the powers of darkness. God is the impossible possibility who is beyond all human possibilities. The question about the divine possibility is a human possibility. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

To be able to ask God, man must already have experience God as the goal of a possible question. If man cannot ask the question of God, then God’s answer—revelation—falls on deaf ears. Revelation would then be injected into history as a foreign body. One cannot sever human activities from both divine and demonic powers. Neither is truly dialectic. If the family is the fulcrum, then the family agency is the lever of professional intervention for the development of interpersonal competence. If family research is to shift the center of its thinking from the idea of adjustment to that of competence this will have important implications for family agencies. And the outlook of these agencies in turn has important bearing on the family research problems that are likely to arise. The final step in testing hypotheses such as those in the previous chapter is to see how they work out in practice, and how they influence the behavior of the staff and clients of family agencies. What the needs of the family are can only ben discerned by examining the historical development of the agencies. The question of whether it is legitimate to intervene in family affairs when the family’s own resources no longer suffice rather than leaving it to relatives and friends is not to be debated here. There probably never was such a phenomenon as a self-sufficient family, securely equipped with resources for meeting all its needs and crises. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

It is useful theoretically to imagine such an ideal type, as guide-line from which to calculate varying degrees of change, but it constitutes a hypothetical extreme which could only be approached and never attained in reality. It would be strange to conclude that the further back one goes in history, the more competent each family was to meet the needs of its members. It is true that in earlier times larger families and omnipresent neighbor gave the individual family member constant support. However, many couples nowadays get along quite well without dependence on either of these. Furthermore, techniques and resources are more plentiful now than they ever have been. If the self-sufficient family is taken as one extreme, the opposite would of course be the situation where all the former functions of the family had been transferred to other, specialized institutions. It is often said that in the early twenties certain communist thinkers and leaders in the Soviet Union actually sought to establish such a state of affairs; the evidence indicates that they moved in that direction, but not quite that far. Their later reversal of direction suggests the probability that this extreme, like its opposite, while a concept useful in theory, is not a goal achievable in practice. In practice, the functions of the family fluctuate within a considerably more narrow range than these extremes. It is doubtful if any function of the family had been wholly or permanently transferred to other institutions. If one looks at the family historically, it may appear as if the transfer of functions to and from the family has on the whole been unfavorable to the family, but some functions have occasionally been returned to the family, and almost any of them may be. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

The conspicuous current example is of course the rise of home television at the expense of the motive theaters. It must be kept in mind that what are usually termed the functions of the family are but names for large categories of concrete behavior, and that the content of these categories is continually changing. It is important to emphasize that transfer of function can and does occur in both directions. After analyzing the changing functions of the family, there is the perturbing implication that the spectacular recent decline in family function is inevitable and irreversible. Some of the commentators who have elaborated upon this observation accept this pessimistic implication. Other declare that while now the family is largely deprived of it economic, protective, educational, recreational, and religious functions, it can concentrate better on its remaining task of child-rearing and affectional response. If this is not merely a wishful play on words, it is at best a groping conclusion. To get a firmer grasp of the realities, we must come down from such a level of abstraction. Not only the structure and processes of family life but the other institutions of the community have ceased to be regarded as natural and inevitable givens. The functionalist type of analysis, which stars with the postulation of an array of human needs and proceeds from there to delineate the necessary character of any social system which is deemed to satisfy thee needs, is perhaps a useful model for the description of a community, its members, and their institutions at a given moment. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

It cannot, however, account for change or conflict within that community except through making auxiliary postulates about the natural, organic unity of the social system and the occurrence of dysfunctions or external interferences impending the system’s healthy, natural operation. Thus the many variants of functionalist analysis all share the idea that the goal of human striving is social and personal equilibrium or adjustment. Some of these theorists utilize an analogy to Newtonian physic, in which the components of a field acquire their relations through a balance of forces; others utilize an analogy to homeostasis or the healing process in the living organism, whereby the organism restores the status quo ante external deprivation or injury. Our retention of the concept of functions should not be taken to imply acceptance of any such debatable explanations. On the contrary, we have discarded adjustment as the imputed and desired end of activity, and we consider it indispensable to account as realistically as possible for each of the recent historical changes in the family, and for conflict over those to come. To do so, the concept of values must keep precedence over the concept of functions. It might be supposed that family agencies have come into existence only to repair deficiencies in the structure and functioning of the family. There is some truth to this observation but it is a limited truth. When subject to disaster or disability, families in the past have often turned for help to kin and neighbors, that is, to other families. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

On the other hand, quite unprovoked by calamity or deprivation, they have often combined to create new institutions which by concentrating on a limited task could perform some function better than the family itself. Even if it is only to make up for deficiencies, a new institution must prove its superiority over potential competitors or over informal assistance by other families. The family as an institution or any particular family does not simply try to discharge its function but it seeks to maximize its values which are ever in flux—being clarified, criticized, harmonized, added to, subtracted from, and limited by what is believed or found to be possible. If it were correct to assume the existence of given needs and their necessary satisfaction, then at any given time, if these needs were not met, the individual would perish. While this is true of a person’s organism, each person is more than a mere organism. If a person as a self-conscious personality does not sufficiently and intelligently value one’s organism, one will let it perish; one’s organism is one’s servant, not one’s master. A person wants not only survival but many other satisfactions as well, the nature of which cannot be deduced from one’s organism. One wants optimal satisfaction of these wants also. Moreover, one must in practice balance the satisfaction of these many wants—which accumulate by discovery and ramify with experience—against each other. One must constantly evaluate. One must set up categories and standards of judgment for organizing one’s behavior. These are one’s values One’s values are constantly being corrected, ratified, intensified, extended, and systematized through the sharing of experience with others. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

For this process of interaction in which one is immersed from birth, language and other signs furnish the necessary concepts and rankings. Communication is the sine qua non of objectification of values, for the investigation as for the investigator. If we may then define functions as the tasks or necessary actions for realizing taken values rather than given needs, the explanation for the transfer of function from the family to other institutions becomes, looking backward, almost obvious. Looking forward, it becomes problematic, contingent upon how current programs work out compared to expectations, and contingent upon continuous reformulation of what is desirable and possible. We thus seek to anticipate the emergence of changes and polarization of conflicts from within the system, rather than blindly awaiting disturbances from without. In reviewing the resources of family agencies it is necessary to keep two things in mind. First, many functions previously performed within the family have been taken over by institutions not currently regarded as family agencies. Hence, in terms of realization of values almost any agency could broadly be regarded as a family agency. Second, some institutions have developed that explicitly assume responsibility for the welfare of family members. Only these will here be called family agencies. Even with this limitation, it is clear that there is a vast proliferation of institutional machinery allegedly concerned with aiding the family, either directly as a unit, or indirectly through help to individual family members. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19