Levitt And Dubner Summary

The chapter starts off by how to ask a good question. Levitt and Dubner say asking a good questions doesn’t mean it has never been asked before. The term “conventional wisdom” means is a theory, but sometimes means isn’t always true. A professor who talked to a group of college students about the number of homeless people who die each year said, “45 homeless people die each second- which would mean 1.4 billion homeless people die a year” (Levitt and Dubner, 2009). This is an example of conventional wisdom because the speaker gave a statistic, but was a very misleading. That would mean 701,000 dead homeless people per year and that would be around one third of the U.S’s population. Another way of showing conventional wisdom is by advertising. Many advertisements can be …show more content…
A good lie is often how to draw people’s attention into the product. Levitt and Dubner then switch points by talking about drug deals. They say that drug dealing is one of the most profitable jobs in America (Levitt and Dubner, 2009). A college student at University of California, Sudhi Venkatesh, performed research on how it felt to be black or poor? He went into the poorest and most violent community in the nation: the southside of Chicago. While getting data for his project, Venkatesh was jumped by a gang called the Black Gangster Disciple. The gang held Venkatesh captive, afraid he would reveal some of their secrets.The leader of the gang, J.T., agreed to let Venkatesh go after twenty-four hours. Venkatesh was very curious of what actually goes on inside a gang. Therefore he goes on to spend the next six years with the Black Disciples. Over the years Venkatesh saw a lot of what goes inside of a gang. Levitt and Dubner compare a gang to McDonald’s, by how there are different levels inside the gang and by how they get paid. The lower gang members, like the burger flippers, get paid very little. While the