[jeffcoat]

I picked up Venkatesh's book _Gang Leader for a Day_ on the strength of the work cited here ... and ended up throwing it out.

He's not an economist: he has a very clear idea of which jobs are useful in a society and which jobs aren't, and no interest at all in what the market has to say.

I'm sure he has useful data, but everything he writes goes through that filter, and there's no way to trust what he says about people dealing drugs, because he makes it so clear that everyone doing anything outside the law is Evil, and so everything they do is tainted.

[kahawe]

Interesting... I just knew him through "Freakonomics". Well, I think he provided the information and the data used in that one chapter and Levitt/Dubner ultimately wrote it, probably also for lack of better sources. How many scientists hook up with gangs and prostitutes? To be fair, Venkatesh is a sociologist.

I guess both (all three) of them are leaning more toward the "infotainment" side of things in those works - after all, they want their books to sell and I wouldn't be surprised if he absolutely had to make that point "it is evil" so often, otherwise the bible thumpers/moralizers might have gotten to him that he promotes gangs? Levitt/Dubner had to go out of their way to make clear they aren't trying to promote abortions in their "legalizing abortions reduced the crime rate" chapter... which I found extremely peculiar, given that it was nothing but an analysis and a convincing theory for the data at hand.