Sunday, March 2, 2008

Freakonomics Chapter 3 and 4 A.K.A. Chunk 2

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in the third chapter tackle the issue of drug dealers and why they still live with their mothers. Levitt describes how someone he knew from the University did research on the gangs and drug dealers for sociology. Levitt, as an economist, was asked by the sociologist to help him with a notebook given given to him by one of the members. Levitt looked through it and realized that drug dealing is run like any other business - Levitt compares it to McDonald's. According to Levitt, at the bottom are the people that stand at street corners waiting to run at a threat or sell his merchandise, then there are the ringleaders of the gangs - who don't sell drugs, but do distribute the money within the small sector, then there are the ones at the top - the ones that get the most out of it (of course there are people in between these three, but they are not necessary for this precis). The notebook contained numbers that explained the distribution of the money. From this information, Levitt discovered that the actual dealers aren't rich because they get a very small portion of the earnings - they work at about $3.30 an hour - and they need to take second jobs. Clearly minimum wage makes a person struggle to find a home so how difficult would it be at $3.30 an hour? Thus, the low pay for the dealers means that they can't even rent a place so what other choice do they have but to live with their mothers?
In chapter 4, Levitt and Dubner argue that the reason that there was a decrease in criminal activity in the late 1990s and early 2000 was not so much a larger police force or new ways to find who the criminals are, but that there was a case earlier in the topic of abortion. Levitt argues that because abortion was legalized, all of those children who would have been born - and because the parents did not want them, were drug abusers, and/or were raped - unloved and this is a serous marker of deliquency. Most, if not all, of these children who were not born would have become the next generation of crime, but because they were not born, there was not way they could comitt murder or any other criminal activities.

Tone: serious and excited (from saying all of these realizations)

Rhetorical Strategies : appeal to logic, use of numbers & statistics

Questions: Why do people work as a drug dealer if the pay is not good and they would be better off working at McDonald's at minimum wage?
Why can abortion not be controlled rather than legal or illegal?

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