Department of social anthropology seminar with Dennis Rodgers

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to this week's seminar. Dr. Dennis Rodgers, Senior Research Fellow, Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester, will present the following paper:

Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? Contrasting views from Chicago and Managua

Abstract
Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh’s (2000) analysis of the finances of a drug-dealing gang in Chicago is arguably one of the most influential recent contributions to gang literature. Based on a unique data set, it highlights how earnings within drug-dealing gangs are generally “enormously skewed”, with most dealers earning little more than “roughly the minimum wage”, and only a few privileged individuals at the top of the gang pyramid receiving anything in the way of substantial returns (Levitt and Venkatesh, 2000: 757). In his subsequent best-selling book Freakonomics (2005), co-authored with Stephen Dubner, Levitt drolly suggests that the low earning power of most drug dealers explains why they often still live with their moms, and concludes more generally that “the problem of crack dealing is [that] …a lot of people are competing for a very few prizes [and] …an immutable law of labor [is that] when there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn’t pay well” (Levitt and Dubner, 2005: 105). Levitt implicitly assumes that drug dealing is an economic activity that occurs in the context of an open and competitive labour market. The example of a drug-selling gang in Managua, Nicaragua, suggests that this is not necessarily the case, as drug-dealing occurred within a highly segmented labour market in which only a few individuals could participate. As a result, although drug-selling was organized in a hierarchical manner and earnings were unevenly distributed along lines similar to those described by Levitt and Venkatesh in Chicago, even those individuals associated with the lowest tier of the drug-dealing pyramid earned three to four times more than the median local wage. To this extent, although Nicaraguan drug dealers lived with their moms like their Chicagoan peers, they did so not because they were too poor to move out, but rather because they were rich and could afford to take care of them, contrarily to the majority of poor Nicaraguans (see Rodgers, 2007). This fundamental disparity between drug dealing in Chicago and Managua is partly a function of the more decentralised organisation of drug trafficking in Nicaragua compared to the US, as well as, more broadly, the distinct natures of the wider national economies, and the fact that – as the recent WikiLeaks revelations have highlighted – the contemporary Nicaraguan state is deeply and corruptly penetrated by the drugs trade, and significantly facilitates its operations.

All are welcome!