I finally picked up a copy of Freakonomics, and am a bit on the fence after all the hype. The introduction and first couple chapters were not particularly interesting to me, it was mostly establishing that people would either cheat or settle for their own best interest. Shocking! You mean that a real estate agent is only out for their own commission, and trying to get as many of those as possible? Real estate agents! Next thing you’ll be telling me high powered lawyers have many clients and prefer to do business by phone so they can get blowjobs and rub coke on their gums while still racking up billable hours. Or that people who have jobs on tv like talking a lot.
The writing itself is a nice middle ground between malcolm gladwell’s entertaining pap, and john allen paulos’ book, Innumeracy. There is a frank discussion of how statistics work, and how emotions and testimonials can bias people, but its filled with a wide variety of interesting anecdotes. This had left me on the fence: Gladwell is a master of interesting anecdotes, but his conclusions are always vague, and lie somewhere in between “feel-good” and “trying to be profound”. Also, some times pretentious.
The first chapter on crime “Why do drug dealers live with their mom?” Was interesting. Whenever I had heard reference to this on some dreary NPR interview, or in passing conversation, it always made me roll my eyes. People who sit and write academic papers obviously never had a single friend who sold weed. All that schooling, high school college, grad school. How is that seriously surprising? Whatever the worst drug is, is almost necessarily the cheapest. Crack had a hayday, not because it “brought class to the mass”, but because it cost you less than some cheap hooch, and fucked you up faster and harder. Thats the reason people still huff spray paint, and third world kids huff sprite bottles full of sewage. Someone who desperately wants to get fucked up will do so, regardless of motivation (poverty, hardships, lunacy, bad grades, jerk parents). Crack isn’t something that people just think would be fun, folks who start smoking crack have a long history of getting fucked up. To the point that they do not want, or can’t afford something better. Or it no longer does the job. The addictive qualities are something that kick in after they get into it, but a persons self destructive behavior has a real history and influences, and not just “its cheap and people think coke is classy.”
The addictiveness and short termw affects does drive demand, and causes a lot of competition, which is unique to the very cheap and hard drugs, and is certainly what created the ocean of drug dealing businesses as described in the book. Certainly there are similar organizations for other drugs, as well, albeit sometimes with different suppliers, and all sorts of clientele, but amassing, distributing, and selling any product, legal or not, takes a large organization and a lot of teamwork.
What was interesting, was the sociologist who spent 6 years sleeping on floors and moving from family to family studying the conditions. I have never been one to believe either the hip-hop or republican stereotypes of millionaire street pushers, and cadillac welfare queens. I think more common is the older millionaire who collects social security checks, even though they dont need to, because they paid into it.
The living conditions of the poor in America is something that is generally ignored. When Katrina hit, this was immediately brought to the surface and inspired the usual useless handwringing and liberal guilt, little in the way of recovery of the demolished places that had already been all but abandoned to the poor.
What I find a little disturbing is that the success of a few is found remarkable. Or somehow unsurprising. The fact that in a huge group of disenfranchised people with no resources or opportunity that some people would manage to get a solid education, but find the rest of the world unsympathetic use their talents to live in the world they were from to find their own success is pure human nature. Being surprised that there are smart, organized, and sometimes ruthless people who manage to survive and do well is not a surprise, because they are born into an environment where they have to survive.
A rich kid who has every need attended to, and gets through a prep school to get into a top-notch college and then finds a cushy job in business is not surprising either. What would be surprising is finding one of them who had managed to succeed in the others world.
Ultimately, I found the chapter interesting because someone had anthropologically crossed cultures, documented, and had evidence of the numbers. Not at all about how it was organized, or what the numbers were. Truthfully, that should be the point of the book, but the premise was based on assumptions that I find reprehensible.
A parting thought (for now):
Alan Kay once remarked on programming:
“Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.”
While the part about Shakespeare is mixed (Shakespeare was written for the common folk, pretentious academic folk don’t like modern english adaptations because much of it just sounds like a soap opera. Which much of it is. To appreciate SHAKESPEARE, then, you must be an intellectual and wade through tomes of baroque language so you can fully understand it as a play, which requires a certain kind of “sophistication” that is lost on plebs like me). The truth is that over the last 30 years there is a definite white-collar pop culture that has been gbuilt up over “The Web” and “Geek Culture”, and people really think that they can just start a website or software company and be a “rockstar” (their term). This particular chapter made a lot of allusions to typical pop culture: movie stars, pop starts, pro athletes. However, there has been a large rise in the pop culture of trying to be a tech mogul, and get on the inside track. This is because there are a lot of preppy rich kids who have managed to make some money, but it is the same hierarchy: only a few make it to the show.
That last sentence is what this was going to be about initially. The rest is just tirade.
Peace!