Ashoka Chooses GMU as ChangeMaker Campus

The Ashoka Foundation has chosen George Mason University and 3 other schools for their Changemaker Campus program.

This pilot program’s goal is to bring social entrepreneurship to the students, faculty, and administrators on the participating campuses. Read about the Change Maker Campus initiative here. From Ashoka’s website,

Over the course of the next year, we aim to bring students and faculty together with practitioners, thought leaders, and philanthropists to create new and effective partnerships for sustainable social change.

We’ll carefully monitor and evaluate what happens along the way, identifying the precise outcomes and impact of the program and the innovative teaching and partnerships it spurs. Apart from the impact at each partner university, the program is thus meant to capture the how-to strategies and best practices for effecting deep, lasting, and campus-wide social change.

There will be two meetings this week for GMU students, faculty, and staff to check out.

 

Are prostitutes entrepreneurs?

I have been interested for a long time in prostitution and its social and economic roles. It’s a subject with  great relevance across countries – to the tax base, safety of women, empowerment or disempowerment, ethics and culture, religion and morality, etc.

Moral discussion aside, workers (male and female) in the sex industry provide a service for which there is demand. Prostitution would not occur if there were no customers. If one includes self-employment within “entrepreneurship”, which some do, then this is an interesting and understudied area of research.

My personal interest in prostitution is how it relates to the longterm welfare and employment choices of women, and how policy can be designed against trafficking , sexual slavery and child prostitution. Reality (and history!) indicate that prostitution is not going to stop and it may be time to think about things like safety and disease control.

I’ll blog more on this later, and on some new research on prostitution. A great start is a paper by Steve Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh on street-level prostitution in Chicago (see here). Two important findings: (1) “Condoms are used only one-fourth of the time and the price premium for unprotected sex is small”; and (2) “A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police office than to get officially arrested by one”.

Additionally, there are some interesting organizational and management elements to prostitution as well, like the relationship between pimps and prostitutes.

In the meantime, check out (here) what the State Tax Authority APEH has done in Hungary, where entrepreneur permits can be issued to commerical sex workers, in order to attract the more than 20,000 people and equivalent of 717.13 million Euro lost in the underground sex industry. Talk about a tax base!

 

StoreAdore.com — Harvard Business School

Found out about this company on the Style page of the WSJ. Storeadore.com is a website that will help people find great shopping when they are visiting other cities. According to the Ins and Outs column by Jennifer Sarnow and Ray Smith,

The site, launched earlier this year by avid shoppers Meredith Barnett and Cristina Miller, who roomed together at Harvard Business School, profiles boutiques in New York City, the Hamptons, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., as well as online stores. San Francisco will be added in August and Miami, Dallas, Houston and Atlanta in the fall.

Here is their website and here is a little bit about them. (Who is your roomate? Lab partner? Neighbor?)