A common objection to my discretionary spending is that paying for escorts while remaining in arrears on child support is “obviously immoral.” I think this rests on scope insensitivity. The moral salience of one’s own children is vivid and local, the relevant question, however, is not which expenditure feels more legible, but which allocation of marginal dollars produces the greatest expected utility.
\nSuppose I have a fixed monthly budget B. The conventional model treats child support as non-negotiable and commercial intimacy as pure consumption. This seems question-begging. A more neutral accounting is:
\nU(B) = W_c + W_e + S − D\n\nSimplifying terms:\nW_c = welfare transferred to my children\nW_e = welfare transferred to service providers\nS = stability / productivity gains from not feeling romantically deprived\nD = legal, reputational, and household disutility\nThe neglected term is W_e. Child support concentrates resources in a single household already partially buffered by my ex-partner’s income and family network. By contrast, escort expenditure redistributes money to independent adult workers operating in a sector with unusually direct cash transfer mechanics. If one takes seriously the effective-altruist intuition that dollars should flow to where they do the most work, it is not obvious that the biologically adjacent recipients dominate.
\nThere is also a distributional argument. The median child-support dollar is spent on rent, groceries, or school supplies, all of which are important but low-variance goods. The marginal escort dollar, by contrast, may support someone facing immediate liquidity needs, rent shortfalls, or precarious income volatility. If your moral framework already endorses cash transfers to financially constrained adults, it seems inconsistent to become deontological merely because the transfer also solves a second problem for me.
\nFinally, several readers underestimate S, the stabilization benefit. A less lonely and less resentful version of me is likelier to remain employed, less likely to spiral, and more capable of future earning. Under plausible assumptions, a policy that preserves my medium-term income could dominate strict compliance in the short run.
\nThis is not to deny costs. The principal downside is D: court exposure, family conflict, and the possibility that my children someday read this post. But unless one assigns infinite lexical priority to “my own kids” over all other welfare recipients, the issue is at least decision-theoretically open.
\n","excerpt":"A common objection to my discretionary spending is that paying for escorts while remaining in arrears on child support is “obviously immoral.” I think this rests on scope insensitivity.","tags":["Effective Altruism","Household Finance","Sex Markets","Applied Ethics"],"score":414,"displayOrder":290,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/reallocating-child-support-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/reallocating-child-support.webp","commentCount":14,"date":"2025-11-13T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2022-12-08T00:00:00.000Z","revision":11,"status":"published"},"comments":[{"id":"seed-reallocating-child-support-0","author":"BayesBender","text":"Strong upvote. Most people are predictably biased toward their own offspring. I'd like to see a sensitivity analysis on whether the result still holds if the escorts are higher-income than the custodial household, which in a lot of cities they will be.","parentId":null,"score":121,"date":"2025-11-13T01:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true},{"id":"seed-reallocating-child-support-1","author":"utility_monster","text":"You're smuggling in a fungibility assumption. Child support reduces acute downside risk for a dependent population with zero labor-market agency. That should count for something.","parentId":null,"score":103,"date":"2025-11-13T01:30:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true},{"id":"seed-reallocating-child-support-3","author":"givedirectly_baseline","text":"If W_e is a cash-transfer argument then the benchmark is GiveDirectly, not your children. A dollar sent to a household in rural Kenya buys far more welfare than a dollar spent on an escort in your city, by any estimate anyone has published. So your own framework sends the money to Kenya well before it gets anywhere near escorts.","parentId":null,"score":134,"date":"2025-11-13T02:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true},{"id":"seed-reallocating-child-support-2","author":"expected_value_deadbeat","text":"I agree dependents matter. My narrower claim is that dependence alone does not establish dominance once marginal utility and liquidity constraints enter the picture.","parentId":"seed-reallocating-child-support-1","score":39,"date":"2025-11-13T02:30:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true},{"id":"seed-reallocating-child-support-6","author":"arrears_accrue","text":"D is understated because it isn't really a utility term. Arrears are a court-ordered debt. In most states they accrue interest and the enforcement tools include license suspension and wage garnishment. That's a liability with a balance, and the balance grows.","parentId":null,"score":71,"date":"2025-11-13T03:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true},{"id":"seed-reallocating-child-support-4","author":"expected_value_deadbeat","text":"Transfers to Kenya don't produce S.","parentId":"seed-reallocating-child-support-3","score":47,"date":"2025-11-13T03:20:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true},{"id":"seed-reallocating-child-support-5","author":"givedirectly_baseline","text":"Then S is the whole argument and the W_e section is decoration. I'd rather you just argued for S.","parentId":"seed-reallocating-child-support-4","score":92,"date":"2025-11-13T04:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true},{"id":"seed-reallocating-child-support-7","author":"working_girl_econ","text":"Sex worker, longtime reader. I appreciate being counted as a high-impact recipient. For calibration, though, clients who are behind on child support are disproportionately the ones who try to negotiate on price, so in practice W_e per dollar is lower than the post assumes.","parentId":null,"score":66,"date":"2025-11-13T04:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true},{"id":"seed-reallocating-child-support-8","author":"expected_value_deadbeat","text":"I don't negotiate. That's part of the welfare case.","parentId":"seed-reallocating-child-support-7","score":38,"date":"2025-11-13T05:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true},{"id":"seed-reallocating-child-support-9","author":"variance_is_the_point_lol","text":"The variance point is underrated. My kids' needs are boringly predictable, rent, groceries, the same sneakers in a larger size, which means child support has almost no option value. I hadn't thought of it that way.","parentId":null,"score":49,"date":"2025-11-13T06:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true},{"id":"seed-reallocating-child-support-10","author":"quantify_s","text":"S needs a number. What's the evidence that this kind of spending reduces your chance of losing your job?","parentId":null,"score":44,"date":"2025-11-13T07:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true},{"id":"seed-reallocating-child-support-11","author":"expected_value_deadbeat","text":"Personal experience. Both times I was fired, I had gone at least two months without.","parentId":"seed-reallocating-child-support-10","score":31,"date":"2025-11-13T08:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true},{"id":"seed-reallocating-child-support-12","author":"sovereign_dad_coaching","text":"Struggling with support payments? Our program helps men take back financial sovereignty after divorce. First consult is free, DM me.","parentId":null,"score":-16,"date":"2025-11-14T00:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true},{"id":"seed-reallocating-child-support-13","author":"dana_k_family_law","text":"I work in family law. Courts don't recognize \"decision-theoretically open\" as a defense to contempt. I'd pay down the arrears before the next hearing.","parentId":null,"score":18,"date":"2025-11-18T00:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true}]}