Short Comments for Venkatesh (2008)
这篇书评可能有关键情节透露
I recently finished listening to the book, “Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets” by Prof. Sudhir Venkatesh, on Audible. Overall, I think this is a great book to me on on the urban poverty in USA.
There are two things that impress me in the book. First, the local gangs substitute the state on issues like law enforcement in poor regions when the state is basically absent. Local gangs have incentives to maintain order within their district because they cannot sell drugs if the district is not safe. Local gangs are acting as-if they are police and mediator to maintain order by using their physical power and their ability of providing resolutions to disputes. Also, local gangs are embedded in the community to make themselves work more efficiently.
Second, the stories on how women cooperate with each other to survive in the financial hardship impress me. In Prof. Mearsheimer’s book, “The Great Delusion”, he talks about how to apply realism logic to human decisions. The stories here demonstrate the usefulness of realism logic: to maximize their survival probability, women need to form social groups as a safety net to deal with the risks they encounter.
To sum up, to me, this is a great book on the “poor economics in USA”, and exemplifies high quality qualitative research.