On the Books

Readers of Freakonomics have met this author before: Sudhir Venkatesh was the source of that book's fascinating explanation of why so many drug dealers live with their moms. A graduate student in sociology at the University of Chicago during America's crack epidemic, Venkatesh spent years around members of the city's Black Kings gang. He even got a copy of the gang's ledgers, which showed that, while a few top leaders of the organization were paid handsomely, the majority of drug sellers--the guys on the street, those most at risk of arrest and injury--earned very little. The compensation scale, in other words, was very much like that of many major American corporations. The dealers lived with their moms because they had to.

Following the success of Freakonomics, somebody realized that Venkatesh--now a tenured professor at Columbia University--probably had a pretty interesting story to tell about his gang days too, one that might attract a larger audience than his two books of sociology, Off the Books and American Project. And so we have the strangely titled Gang Leader for a Day.

It gets off to a brilliant start. Venkatesh, a ponytailed math major from suburban San Diego and the son of immigrants from India (his father is a professor too), wanders from cosseted Hyde Park into one of the poor neighborhoods that surround the university on Chicago's South Side. His professor, William Julius Wilson, is mounting a new study of urban poverty, and Venkatesh has volunteered to help administer a questionnaire. He's looking for young black men, and Census data in the university library point him toward a building in the Lake Park housing projects in nearby Oakland.

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