Chapter 3: Freakonomics

This chapter was more interesting to me than the second chapter!

I thought, just like the other titles and questions risen about certain topics was very interesting in this case. "Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?" I love how the author takes such simple questions as of this, and makes your really think about it and even does some background research on it. These so simple questions that I even sometimes think of, REALLY make me THINK as to WHY.

One thing I liked about this chapter is that since I never grew up in these types of communities, it really gave me a slight insight on how people feel about living in there, such as when Sudhir Venkatesh went around to Chicago's poorest neighborhood to see how the children thought about living there. It was interesting that his choices he had for their answers were not suitable for their liking, instead they wanted every negative answer rather than a positive one. Now I never grew up in a really nice and rich neighborhood and never had the nicest things, but then again I never lived like some of these children. It really made me think about how grateful I am and how lucky I should be. Anyways, enough about me, and back to the chapter. I always assumed that the higher you went on the chart when it came to drug dealing, the better off you were with money, but never knew that some people got paid extremely as low as they did for how much they are risking their lives. Even though I was always aware of how much drug dealers made, I was shocked at how much once they got way up on the charts.

I feel bad for some of the kids who are drug dealers because from this reading in some cases you can sense that this is not the life that they want to live. The one section gives some statistics about the children living in the ghetto, "56% of the neighborhood's children lived below the poverty line. 78% came from the single-parent homes. Fewer than 5% of the neighborhood's adults had a college degree; barely one in the three adult men worked at all." These statistics really blew my mind and kind of gave me reason as to why these children are in these situations.

The other section that I didn't know some about was the introduction of crack cocaine. As naive as this may sound, I always just assumed that cocaine and crazk cocaine were the same things. It was interesting to read about the difference and how crack cocaine came about. I never knew that one was known to be cheaper than the other. Like when they talked about cocaine was white, pure, and beautiful, while crack cocaine was for more of the poor people and not seen to be as "beautiful and pure" as cocaine.

This reading really made me think, once again. I enjoyed it a lot :)