Supply And Demand

Friday, October 27, 2006

I was paging through The Daily Bruin, UCLA's newspaper (don't ask why), and couldn't help but notice a huge ad seeking an egg donor. They wanted the woman to be very attractive, very tall, very intelligent and (very?) white. Oh yeah, and under 30.

How much did they offer? $80,000 plus expenses. Not bad.

It made me think back to my days in college and law school, where I knew a number of such women. If these offers had been around back then, I imagine some would have left academia and churned out product while they were still young enough. (I wonder if I could have gotten a finder's fee.)

I checked but couldn't find any similar offers for sperm.

Columbus Guy says: Necessary joke, but of course the economics is entirely different. In the one case there is an extraction cost, and $80,000 seems reasonable, since, given most of the women I've dated, it's quite a battle to get to the thing. In the other case it's a containment cost, and given the size of the diovorce industry, I'd say it takes even more than $80,000 to keep it in.