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Duke, though he never won the high political office he often sought, proved

himself a master of information abuse. As Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku

Klux Klan, he was able to compile a mailing list of thousands of rank-and-file

Klansmen and other supporters who would eventually become his political base.

Not content to use the list only for himself, he sold it for $150,000 to the governor

of Louisiana. Years later, Duke would once again use the list himself, letting his

supporters know that he’d fallen on hard times and needed their donations. In

this way Duke was able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for his

continuing work in the field of white supremacy. He had explained to his

supporters in a letter that he was so broke that the bank was trying to repossess

his house.

In truth, Duke had already sold his house for a solid profit. (It isn’t known

whether he used a real-estate agent.) And most of the money he raised from his

supporters was being used not to promote any white supremacist cause but

rather to satisfy Duke’s gambling habit. It was a sweet little scam he was

running—until he was arrested and sent to federal prison in Big Spring, Texas.

Levitt fits everywhere and nowhere. He is a noetic butterfly that no one has

pinned down (he was once offered a job on the Clinton economic team, and the

2000 Bush campaign asked him about being a crime advisor) but who is claimed

by all. He has come to be acknowledged as a master of the simple, clever

solution. He is the guy who, in the slapstick scenario, sees all the engineers

futzing with a broken machine—and then realizes that no one has thought to

plug it in.

—THE N EW Y ORK T IMES M AGAZINE, AUGUST 3, 2003

3

Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their

Moms?

The two previous chapters were built around a pair of admittedly freakish

questions: What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? and

How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real-estate agents? But if you ask

enough questions, strange as they seem at the time, you may eventually learn

something worthwhile.

The first trick of asking questions is to determine if your question is a good one.

Just because a question has never been asked does not make it good. Smart

people have been asking questions for quite a few centuries now, so many of the

questions that haven’t been asked are bound to yield uninteresting answers.

But if you can question something that people really care about and find an

answer that may surprise them—that is, if you can overturn the conventional

wisdom—then you may have some luck.

It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the

phrase “conventional wisdom.” He did not consider it a compliment. “We

associate truth with convenience,” he wrote, “with what most closely accords

with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward

effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what

contributes most to self-esteem.” Economic and social behavior, Galbraith

continued, “are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring.

Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our

understanding.”

So the conventional wisdom in Galbraith’s view must be simple, convenient,

comfortable, and comforting—though not necessarily true. It would be silly to

argue that the conventional wisdom is never true. But noticing where the

conventional wisdom may be false—noticing, perhaps, the contrails of sloppy or

self-interested thinking—is a nice place to start asking questions.

Consider the recent history of homelessness in the United States. In the early

1980s, an advocate for the homeless named Mitch Snyder took to saying that

there were about 3 million homeless Americans. The public duly sat up and took

notice. More than 1 of every 100 people were homeless? That sure seemed high,

but…well, the expert said it. A heretofore quiescent problem was suddenly

catapulted into the national consciousness. Snyder even testified before Congress

about the magnitude of the problem. He also reportedly told a college audience

that 45 homeless people die each second—which would mean a whopping 1.4

billion dead homeless every year. (The U.S. population at the time was about 225

million.) Assuming that Snyder misspoke or was misquoted and meant to say

that one homeless person died every forty-five seconds, that’s still 701,000 dead

homeless people every year—roughly one-third of all deaths in the United States.

Hmm. Ultimately, when Snyder was pressed on his figure of 3 million homeless,

he admitted that it was a fabrication. Journalists had been hounding him for a

specific number, he said, and he hadn’t wanted them to walk away empty-

handed.

It may be sad but not surprising to learn that experts like Snyder can be self-

interested to the point of deceit. But they cannot deceive on their own. Journalists

need experts as badly as experts need journalists. Every day there are newspaper

pages and television newscasts to be filled, and an expert who can deliver a

jarring piece of wisdom is always welcome. Working together, journalists and

experts are the architects of much conventional wisdom.

Advertising too is a brilliant tool for creating conventional wisdom. Listerine, for

instance, was invented in the nineteenth century as a powerful surgical

antiseptic. It was later sold, in distilled form, as a floor cleaner and a cure for

gonorrhea. But it wasn’t a runaway success until the 1920s, when it was pitched

as a solution for “chronic halitosis”—a then obscure medical term for bad breath.

Listerine’s new ads featured forlorn young women and men, eager for marriage

but turned off by their mate’s rotten breath. “Can I be happy with him in spite of

that?” one maiden asked herself. Until that time, bad breath was not

conventionally considered such a catastrophe. But Listerine changed that. As the

advertising scholar James B. Twitchell writes, “Listerine did not make

mouthwash as much as it made halitosis.” In just seven years, the company’s

revenues rose from $115,000 to more than $8 million.

However created, the conventional wisdom can be hard to budge. Paul

Krugman, the New York Times columnist and devout critic of George W. Bush,

bemoaned this fact as the President’s reelection campaign got under way in early

2004: “The approved story line about Mr. Bush is that he’s a bluff, honest,

plainspoken guy, and anecdotes that fit that story get reported. But if the

conventional wisdom were instead that he’s a phony, a silver-spoon baby who

pretends to be a cowboy, journalists would have plenty of material to work

with.”

In the months leading up to U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, dueling experts floated

diametrically opposite forecasts about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But

more often, as with Mitch Snyder’s homeless “statistics,” one side wins the war

of conventional wisdom. Women’s rights advocates, for instance, have hyped the

incidence of sexual assault, claiming that one in three American women will in

their lifetime be a victim of rape or attempted rape. (The actual figure is more

like one in eight—but the advocates know it would take a callous person to

publicly dispute their claims.) Advocates working for the cures of various tragic

diseases regularly do the same. Why not? A little creative lying can draw

attention, indignation, and—perhaps most important—the money and political

capital to address the actual problem.

Of course an expert, whether a women’s health advocate or a political advisor or

an advertising executive, tends to have different incentives than the rest of us.

And an expert’s incentives may shift 180 degrees, depending on the situation.

Consider the police. A recent audit discovered that the police in Atlanta were

radically underreporting crime since the early 1990s. The practice apparently

began when Atlanta was working to land the 1996 Olympics. The city needed to

shed its violent image, and fast. So each year thousands of crime reports were

either downgraded from violent to nonviolent or simply thrown away. (Despite

these continuing efforts—there were more than 22,000 missing police reports in

2002 alone—Atlanta regularly ranks among the most violent American cities.)

Police in other cities, meanwhile, were spinning a different story during the

1990s. The sudden, violent appearance of crack cocaine had police departments

across the country scrapping for resources. They made it known that it wasn’t a

fair fight: the drug dealers were armed with state-of-the-art weapons and a

bottomless supply of cash. This emphasis on illicit cash proved to be a winning

effort, for nothing infuriated the law-abiding populace more than the image of

the millionaire crack dealer. The media eagerly glommed on to this story,

portraying crack dealing as one of the most profitable jobs in America.

But if you were to have spent a little time around the housing projects where

crack was so often sold, you might have noticed something strange: not only did

most of the crack dealers still live in the projects, but most of them still lived at

home with their moms. And then you may have scratched your head and said,

“Why is that?”

The answer lies in finding the right data, and the secret to finding the right data

usually means finding the right person—more easily said than done. Drug

dealers are rarely trained in economics, and economists rarely hang out with

crack dealers. So the answer to this question begins with finding someone who

did live among the drug dealers and managed to walk away with the secrets of

their trade.

Sudhir Venkatesh—his boyhood friends called him Sid, but he has since reverted

to Sudhir—was born in India, raised in the suburbs of upstate New York and

southern California, and graduated from the University of California at San

Diego with a degree in mathematics. In 1989 he began to pursue his PhD in

sociology at the University of Chicago. He was interested in understanding how

young people form their identities; to that end, he had just spent three months

following the Grateful Dead around the country. What he was not interested in

was the grueling fieldwork that typifies sociology.

But his graduate advisor, the eminent poverty scholar William Julius Wilson,

promptly sent Venkatesh into the field. His assignment: to visit Chicago’s

poorest black neighborhoods with a clipboard and a seventy-question, multiple-

choice survey. This was the first question on the survey:

How do you feel about being black and poor?

1. Very bad

2. Bad

3. Neither bad nor good

4. Somewhat good

5. Very good

One day Venkatesh walked twenty blocks from the university to a housing

project on the shore of Lake Michigan to administer his survey. The project

comprised three sixteen-story buildings made of yellow-gray brick. Venkatesh

soon discovered that the names and addresses he had been given were badly

outdated. These buildings were condemned, practically abandoned. Some

families lived on the lower floors, pirating water and electricity, but the elevators

didn’t work. Neither did the lights in the stairwell. It was late afternoon in early

winter, nearly dark outside.

Venkatesh, who is a thoughtful, handsome, and well built but not aberrationally

brave person, had made his way up to the sixth floor, trying to find someone

willing to take his survey. Suddenly, on the stairwell landing, he startled a group

of teenagers shooting dice. They turned out to be a gang of junior-level crack

dealers who operated out of the building, and they were not happy to see him.

“I’m a student at the University of Chicago,” Venkatesh sputtered, sticking to his

survey script, “and I am administering—”

“Fuck you, nigger, what are you doing in our stairwell?”

There was an ongoing gang war in Chicago. Things had been violent lately, with

shootings nearly every day. This gang, a branch of the Black Gangster Disciple

Nation, was plainly on edge. They didn’t know what to make of Venkatesh. He

didn’t seem to be a member of a rival gang. But maybe he was some kind of spy?

He certainly wasn’t a cop. He wasn’t black, wasn’t white. He wasn’t exactly

threatening—he was armed only with his clipboard—but he didn’t seem quite

harmless either. Thanks to his three months trailing the Grateful Dead, he still

looked, as he would later put it, “like a genuine freak, with hair down to my

ass.”

The gang members started arguing over what should be done with Venkatesh.

Let him go? But if he did tell the rival gang about this stairwell hangout, they’d

be susceptible to a surprise attack. One jittery kid kept wagging something back

and forth in his hands—in the dimming light, Venkatesh eventually realized it

was a gun—and muttering, “Let me have him, let me have him.” Venkatesh was

very, very scared.

The crowd grew, bigger and louder. Then an older gang member appeared. He

snatched the clipboard from Venkatesh’s hands and, when he saw that it was a

written questionnaire, looked puzzled.

“I can’t read any of this shit,” he said.

“That’s because you can’t read,” said one of the teenagers, and everyone laughed

at the older gangster.

He told Venkatesh to go ahead and ask him a question from the survey.

Venkatesh led with the how-does-it-feel-to-be-black-and-poor question. It was

met with a round of guffaws, some angrier than others. As Venkatesh would

later tell his university colleagues, he realized that the multiple-choice answers A

through E were insufficient. In reality, he now knew, the answers should have

looked like this:

1. Very bad

2. Bad

3. Neither bad nor good

4. Somewhat good

5. Very good

6. Fuck you

Just as things were looking their bleakest for Venkatesh, another man appeared.

This was J. T., the gang’s leader. J. T. wanted to know what was going on. Then

he told Venkatesh to read him the survey question. He listened but then said he

couldn’t answer the question because he wasn’t black.