Quick Hits Tuesdays

An Oregon law requiring health insurance prescription plans to cover birth control went into effect on Tuesday. About half the insurers in the state do not cover prescription birth control. More at the National Partnership for Women and Families: Great news for Oregon women with insurance! Not so useful for the masses of women without it.

Bill at Queercents is getting married (congratulations, Bill!) and having just come through the experience himself, has some thoughts about the economics of same sex marriage proposals, where the traditional tropes don't really apply. It's difficult, for example, to conform to the schematic where the man asks woman's father permission to purchase his chattel marry his daughter, the man buys woman ring with two months salary, the man proposes to the woman, etc., when there's not actually a woman involved in any way. I enjoyed reading this since we're not big gender role/tradition people either, sweetie and me. All things considered, Bill's very sweet story is probably more traditional than ours!

Finally, Freakonomics blogger Steven D. Levitt and co-author Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh have a working paper out taking a look at the economics of street-level prostitution in three neighborhoods in Chicago. Interesting in many respects, but this stuck out to me: "Approximately one in twenty tricks performed by prostitutes are 'freebies,' either to police officers or gang members, to avoid arrest or in return for protection from the gang." When the authors presented their findings at a recent acadmic conference, Levitt apparently reported that the prostitutes they surveyed were more likely to have sex with a cop than be arrested by one. Via Freakonomics.