Conventional Wisdom In John Galbraith's Freakonomics

In the third chapter of Freakonomics, the question that is asked is “Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?” The first phrase that is brought up is “conventional wisdom,” and economist John Kenneth Galbraith describes this phrase as information that reinforces a single person's own type of interest and well-being. Conventional wisdom is convenient and comforting, but it does not necessarily have to be. It takes a lot for people to even begin to doubt that conventional wisdom is not true. In the rest of the chapter Levitt tries to dispute the different points of conventional wisdom. Levitt compares conventional wisdom to drug dealing which is one of the highest paying jobs in America to a certain type of crack cocaine dealing. Sudhir Venkatesh, a University of Chicago …show more content…
This goes with the dealing of crack, the foot soldiers will remain foot soldiers because they hoped to move up, then when they came to the realization that they were not going to advance, they quit the dangerous profession. Levitt then talks about the things that determine wages: the first thing is the amount of people that are willing to do the job; the second think is what special skills are required and the unpleasantness of the job; the final one is the demand for the service the job is providing. At the end of the third chapter, a question is stated, what crack cocaine has in common with nylon stockings. When nylon stockings were invented it was a product that was typically for the high-class but was now for everyone. When the original crack cocaine was invented, the same thing happened to it that happened to the stockings. Crack was a drug for the rich and famous, when someone found an easier way to reproduce by making tiny rocks of smokeable cocaine, and called it crack. When the new way to make crack was discovered, the crack boom began, this led to a rise in crack