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We recently solicited your questions about street gangs for Sudhir Venkatesh, the then-grad student we wrote about in Freakonomics who is now a professor of sociology at Columbia. His answers are, IMHO, fascinating. Your questions were really good, too; thanks. Venkatesh will publish a book, Gang Leader for a Day, in early 2008.

Q: Do you think the HBO series The Wire gives an accurate portrayal of gang life? It is clear from the show (if it is as real as it seems) that traditional policing strategies are very ineffective.

A: I am a huge fan of The Wire. I actually watched Season Two with a group of high ranking gang leaders/drug dealers in Chicago, who desperately wished that the series producers would make a separate show about Chicago! Everyone in the room agreed that the writers did well to show the nuances in the underground economy.

Q: A lot of rappers, particularly Jay-Z and 50 Cent, claim to have been successful crack dealers. Any thoughts on this? Were they just low-level dealers barely making a profit, or did they really have something to pay for their future studio time? Did any of the gang members you knew claim to be on the dealer-to-rapper fast track program?

A: In all my years of studying gangs, I have met only a handful of individuals who have actually participated in the dealer-to-rapper fast track program. Alas, they end up going to jail before they get successful, and most of the ones I’ve seen can’t sing worth a lick. I’m deeply skeptical about rappers who proclaim experience with drug sales. Sure, there are a few exceptions, but for the most part I would be very careful about the claims that are made in songs. Many rappers are highly trained musicians who have spent little time on the streets, as it were — think of Mos Def.

Q: How do you define a gang?

A: Great question. There are a few important legal cases where prosecutors tried to prosecute college fraternities as “gangs.” They suggested that the fraternity was an organization that existed to promote criminal behavior, such as the abuse of women and underage drinking. Most judges threw these cases out because they thought that fraternities were not, by definition, “gangs.” But judges rarely gave a logical reason for excluding (typically white) fraternities from the “gang category.”

Indeed, by any valid social scientific definition of a gang — “an established organization whose members come together for solidarity reasons and who engage in delinquent and/or criminal activities” — a fraternity most certainly qualifies. But race, as we know, can be a factor in shaping judicial outcomes.

Q: Yakima, WA, just passed a law that makes it illegal for anyone to be a gang member, with penalties of up to one year in prison. Also, fines can be imposed on parents for failing to prevent their kids from joining. Do you think laws like this help? Are they effective in any way, shape or form?

A: The problem with these municipal ordinances is that police do not always have a foolproof way of determining gang membership. In Chicago, for example, police department officials told me that 4 out of 5 youths are mistakenly believed to be gang members. In smaller cities — like Yakima — I am almost positive that the rate is much lower. However, police often do not have an effective way of figuring out whether someone is in a gang, so they round up many young people who have never had any involvement in gang activity.

You can imagine that the ACLU typically challenges these ordinances, although they are not always successful in their efforts to overturn them.

A modified version of this initiative is used informally in many poor communities. Police will use a “scared straight” approach by taking young people to the station where they frighten them with information about jail conditions, the possibility of being beaten up by imprisoned gang members, and so on. I know many parents who love it when police “scare” their children into getting off the corner and back into school.

Q: What role do women play in gangs? Are they just for sex? Do they ever get to be in charge? Are they low-level peons?

A: In the 1970s and 1980s, female gangs were independent organizations in places like New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee. They tended to be non-criminal, and usually distributed common funds to their members for day care, rent, groceries, and other needs of single mothers. On occasion, they might have engaged in petty fighting, but not often. They were largely political outfits and functioned like social service agencies in ghetto communities that lacked services.

But toward the end of the ’80s, they became wrapped up in drug trafficking — and, just like gender subordination in corporate America, they were under the thumbs of males in the gang who controlled the economy. They were indeed “peons” who were given the lowest level jobs by men — e.g., watching out for cops, holding drugs, cleaning up after gang parties, prostitution — and they had no power at all. No surprise that the female gangs dissolved over time.

Q: Is there a correlation between illegal drug consumption and gangs? If so, do you support drug legalization?

A: To answer the first question, gang members actually have a fairly low rate of hard drug consumption. Certainly they consume alcohol and marijuana (some may call these hard drugs, of course), but they usually don’t have high rates of heroin, crack, and synthetic drug use. This will change as the gang members get older. Those in their late twenties can be users on occasion, particularly if they are unemployed and looking to the gang for earnings.

I am not sure if I support legalization. I support control by the government, but not necessarily legalization. The former would be immensely helpful from the point of crime control and limiting the secondary effects of drug use, such as hardships on families and devastating impacts on communities. The reason I don’t support legalization is that, whenever an illegal substance becomes legalized (think of alcohol), minorities get the short end of the stick; usually, white ethnic groups have the capital to control the market. This was the story for gambling in the ghetto.

Q: My impression is that increasing police presence in a neighborhood where a gang is operating just moves the problem. I lived for four months in such a neighborhood in Portland, OR, and that seemed to be the case there. The police in my community tell me that … moving the problem is like taking care of a lawn: you have to keep after it all the time or the weeds will take over. What do you think?

A: This is a tough question to answer, because drug trafficking has really changed the behavior of urban gangs. In general, entrepreneur-oriented gangs care about making money, so they will certainly move to new locations when their current place of business proves inhospitable. That is, they differ from gangs in the old days (i.e., before the 1980s when drug-related commerce arrived in force). The earlier gangs protected “turf” and took great pride in being a neighborhood outfit. All forms of illegal commercial activity were a rarity for them.

Having said this, a gang is limited in terms of places where it can go. Gangs have to have some relationship with local residents, store owners, etc. — even if the tie is only that of intimidation. So police usually find that gangs who deal drugs tend to maintain several locations, shifting their movements among different street corners, alleys, apartment buildings, abandoned structures, and so on.

Q: What effect has the rise in crystal methamphetamine (meth) had on gang structures? Following Levitt’s “corporate” description, did the gangs develop different departments, split up completely, or merge? Is meth really that major an issue, or is it simply the new crack?

A: Levitt and I worked on the corporate description in the context of African-American urban street gangs. Meth tends to be rural/suburban and most users are white. The meth economy seems to be controlled by individuals or teams who distribute in a highly localized area. They usually come together only to sell the product, and then they disband until a new sales initiative is put into place. They are not really gangs in the traditional sense of the term, but independent mercenary producers/distributors.

Q: How do gang members see themselves as fitting in with society at large? Do gang members have a real comprehension that the things they do — dealing drugs, engaging in violence, destroying property, scaring people — are widely perceived as not only illegal but also morally wrong?

A: Many gang members who attain leadership status are deeply conscious of their perception by wider society. They tend to make two arguments when discussing their behavior: first, that whites also work in the underground economy but are not prosecuted (or stigmatized) to the same degree (just look at the differential rates of punishment for powder cocaine and crack cocaine — the former is distributed by whites to a far greater degree); and second, that corporations also engage in criminal activity, but are rarely viewed as outlaws — not just Enron, but oil and other companies that have established histories of supporting anti-democratic regimes in developing counties to secure their own profits.

Now, you could say that these analogies are bogus and bold-face rationalizations, and I would agree to some degree. But it is important to look at the world from the perspective of the gang member — who sees everyone as a hustler.

Q: Did you go to all four [Grateful Dead] Alpine Valley shows in 1988 (June 19, 20, 22, 23)? Which one did you think was best?

A: Funny you ask. That year, I made it to the Chicago, Irvine, Oakland, and Stanford shows, most of which were worth remembering. And I was getting ready for a mini-summer tour before grad school began — Minnesota, Alpine Valley and Maine — when my girlfriend told me I needed to make a choice: Jerry Garcia or her. So the answer is, “No, I never made it to Alpine Valley.” And, to this day, I have great regrets: I heard they played Blackbird, which I always wanted to hear…

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A few months ago, I attended yet another blasé Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. This time, at least something good came of it. I met a guy named Weber Hsu, one of two young Merrill Lynch employees who left finance to start a yo-yo company, Yo-Yo Nation.

Weber asked if we wanted them to create a special promotional Freakonomics yo-yo. Of course!

The yo-yos are now ready, and we’ll be giving them away as contest prizes. There’s one contest currently running, asking that you guess the pitcher who’ll give up Barry Bonds’s 756th home run. We promised the winner a signed book, but in this case we’ll throw in a yo-yo as well.

We got the yo-yos just in time for the upcoming 1st Annual New York State Yo-Yo Contest and International Yo-Yo Open. I am still trying to untangle the string, so don’t look for me to finish anywhere near the top.

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I grew up just a few miles from the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis. We were a family that was terrified of heights. At least once a month, my father would mention how he thought a bridge over the Mississippi was going to collapse. We would be calling him Nostradamus today, except that his doomsday prediction was about a different bridge (the old Lake Street Bridge, for those who know the Twin Cities). In fact, when officials tried to demolish the Lake Street Bridge to make way for a new one, the first round of explosives proved inadequate — they had to bring in a second round to bring it down. So that bridge proved sturdy, despite my father’s premonitions.

But what, if anything, can we learn from the recent bridge collapse?

One thing I suspect we will learn about is the government’s response to tragedy. No doubt there will be a lot of time and effort spent on extra bridge inspections, and probably a lot of money wasted because no one wants to be at risk for blame if something like this happens again. Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t spend money on bridges; indeed, my friend Tom Paper (who also grew up in the Twin Cities) at Data360.org sent me this link to a chart depicting U.S. government spending on infrastructure as a share of GDP, which has fallen from 3% in the late 1960s to 2% currently. I’m not sure how much of that 1960s spending was put towards building  interstates. But my guess is that the money spent in the wake of a tragedy like this one is not spent well.

Something about the events following the bridge collapse that makes sense, but which I never would have thought about, is how a sharp rise in cell phone usage alerted T-Mobile that something had happened before they heard the news reports. This would seem to hints at strategies that could be useful for coordinating quick emergency response more generally, as well as military/intelligence applications.

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On August 6th, 1941, the U.S. government imposed a nightly curfew on gas stations to reduce fuel use in anticipation of entering World War II. By the way, oil sold at the time for an inflation-adjusted $12.75 a barrel.

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Who will give up Barry Bonds’s 756th home run?

The first person who correctly identifies the pitcher who winds up surrendering Bonds’s record-breaker will get a signed copy of Freakonomics.

One guess per comment, please.

And a related question: for all the talk about not wanting to be the pitcher who gives up Bonds’s 756th, would it really be such a terrible thing? I remember Al Downing mainly because he’s the one who gave up Hank Aaron’s 715th HR. Wouldn’t you think that Downing derives considerable value — name recognition, more invitations to card shows, etc. — from having given up that HR? It’s not like it’s such a black mark to give up a home run to a hitter who’s hit more than 700 of them. From Downing’s Wikipedia page (yes, take it with a grain of salt): “Downing was a radio broadcaster for the Dodgers through 2005. As of 2006, he remains on the Dodgers Speaker’s Bureau.”

Also: after all the hullabaloo about whether Bud Selig would try to witness Bonds’s record-breaking home run, it’s worth noting what George Vecsey wrote not long in the N.Y. Times [sub. req’d.]:

When Aaron passed Babe Ruth’s record of 714 in 1974, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, for whatever reason, sent his assistant, Monte Irvin, a gesture that was widely interpreted as a bungle and an insult.

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Organ donation is heading from a bogus reality show to the big screen: An A.P. article reports that Paris Hilton has landed a role in the movie Repo! The Genetic Opera, a so-called “horror rock” musical that’s “set in a plague-ravaged future where people can purchase new organs on the installment plan from a corporation called Geneco.” Hilton will play the “fame-seeking daughter of Geneco’s owner,” played by Paul Sorvino.

We’ve devoted plenty of time to discussing the effects of individual’s names, but what about the names of companies? De Montfort University finance professor Panagiotis Andrikopoulos has published a study on the “predictive power of corporate name changes on companies’ subsequent long-term stock market performance,” using a sample of 803 company name changes over 15 years. His results indicate that, on average, a name change is viewed as a sign that the company is in trouble (regardless of whether or not it actually is), and the stock price takes a subsequent hit. (Hat tip: John De Palma.)

In response to Levitt’s questioning of the current academic publishing system, reader L. Shane Carlson informed us of his new project, Pronetos.com, an online professor’s network that allows academics to publish papers, receive instant feedback, share podcasts of lectures, and, of course, blog.

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