Madison P Essay

Chapter 3 “Why do drugs dealers still live with their moms?” Aren’t experts supposed to be always right with their statistics? That’s why they studied so hard, long, and even get paid professionally to be subject matter expert in that specific field, but that’s not always the case. In the non-fiction book Freakonomics where American economist Steven D. Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner dive deep into conventional wisdom in one of their chapters “Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?”, where they state several examples of how conventional wisdom is clearly wrong. First of all the authors describe conventional wisdom as a phrase that came from the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith who first used this phrase in his 1958 book “The Affluent Society”. “So the conventional wisdom in Galbraith’s view must be simple, convenient, comfortable, and – though not necessarily true.” (pg86). Galbraith states that the phrase is not necessarily a compliment. Because of its comfortable simplicity, people wrap their minds around and allows them to jump on the “statistics” band wagon quickly with no questions asked, even though it might be highly incorrect. In the article “Conventional wisdom often dead wrong” written by Arianna Huffington of the Chicago Tribune where she interviewed 3 astonishing authors one of which was Stephen Dubner co-author of “Freakonomics.” Dubner gave his opinions and facts on how conventional wisdom is misinterpreted by a mass of people. Susan Cain, author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.”, declared in her interview “… our society, talkers are widely perceived as smarter than quiet types, even though SAT and grade-point averages reveal that this isn’t accurate.” (Chicago Tribune Arianna Huffington).
In addition to this sad issue of dishonesty, police have been noted to use conventional wisdom as well. “They made it known that it wasn’t a fair fight: the drug dealers were armed with state-of-the-art weapons and a bottomless supply of cash.” (pg89). Now did the drug dealers really have a bottomless supply of cash and fancy weapons? No, in fact “… a crack gang works pretty much like the standard capitalist enterprise: you have to be near the top of the pyramid to make a big wage.” (pg100). A gang has mostly foot soldiers who work for less than minimum wage and in order to make to keep up rent they have to pick up another under paid job to just get by. The only people in gangs to actually make decent money are the “board of directors” (pg96) and that’s it, people have to on top in order to make it big. Look at it as if it were a pyramid very few to make enough but still have a lot of power are on top while the base of it is a number of to many to count are barely getting by, so do the police really think the gangs have tons of money and state-of-the-art weapons or were they just making up excuses for their job.
Another factor explaining how conventional wisdom is twisted is Mitch Snyder. He was an advocate for the

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