resipsaloquiturWhy You Should Join A Gang Instead Of Working
They vastly overestimate what low level gang members make off of drug slinging. They’re arguing that it’s economical to lead a gang and hold territory. Well yeah.
FoolishSageThere is a book that is fairly old and potentially outdated called “freakonomics” which includes a chapter basically analysing “if drug dealers make so much money, why do most of them live with their mothers and have a second job at fast food”.
Very interesting read in general
I read Freakonomics, it was a gift. It was… pretty bad, oversimplified and constant correlation-causation flaws. But I’m not an economist or statistician so I dismissed it as just some pop culture thing I wasn’t into. Bailed half-way.
Many years later, I saw this video from Unlearning Economics which does a massive deep dive into the Freakonomics writers and books… and it’s much worse than I though.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=11eTG4_iwqw
I highly recommend a watch (maybe on 1.5 speed) before recommending Freakonomics has anything valuable to share.
The Death of Freakonomics
It’s really the fundamental mistake of thinking “I am a smart person, educated and trained in a specific discipline, and if I apply myself to a field where I’m an outsider, I’ll have a unique perspective that could disrupt the industry”.
There are obviously people who are multidisciplinary, and there are obviously multidisciplinary teams, but you can’t just step into a different discipline as an outside observer and come up with something that isn’t completely full of holes.
People who are good at multidisciplinary collaborations are really good at letting their inexperience show, but that requires a lot of humility. If you drop an MD or a college professor onto a construction site, and have them come up with a list of ways they would improve the process, 19/20 of their suggestions will be obvious garbage to even a new construction worker. The key is to actually bounce those ideas off the people doing the work, and then you get useful stuff. Again, though, that takes humility that is particularly hard to find in academia.
When Canada legalized pot, suddenty every stoner with rich parents opened up a cannabis store, to the point that there were three on every block in some areas. Within 12 months, most were boarded up.
Berengaria_of_NavarreNot necessarily. The economics of supply and demand are also at work. Somewhere like the uk or the us is going to be much more of a buyers market for things like meth and coke because it’s either being made in country or coming across land borders or in fishing boats from the Netherlands whereas New Zealand is an isolated country and I’d be shocked if they have much indigenous production.
That just increases the margin for smugglers. Even there the level of debt bondage and lack of payment for mules is terrible. Not much in the way of unions in criminal enterprises.