11.17.2016

Steven Levitt 1, The freakonomics of crack dealing


TED 2004
Steven Levitt 1, The freakonomics of crack dealing (script)
Summary
Economics is the study of the way in which trade, industry, and money are organized.
How is the situation of various economic activity? The speaker could luckily research about the economics of drug dealing. As you know, drug dealers mean people who buy and sell illegal drugs like crack cocaine. Probably you and the media believe that drug dealers would have had very glamorous lives when the crack cocaine was epidemic. Thus, gangs who buy cocaine from drug dealers and who sell it to other people  also had rich lifestyles.
However, gangs did not have good lives, because they didn't have money. But there was no way to make money from the beginning. Gang members didn't know any rich white people who buy expensive cocaine also.
According to his research, it turned out that the org chart of a gang and McDonald's chart and its franchise were similar. The earnings gtadually as we go down to lower members of the org chart. Additionally, there's the risk that someone shoots at the gangs a lot of the time. Its death rate is about  25 percent per person in the gang for four years. First of all, this system does not have sympathy among dealers, gangs and consumers. Only top drug dealers continue to get paid, even if their workers don't get it. It's because the thought of "weak and shit" really works in this system which is an idea economists don't have.
Freak means strange, odd and unusual. Even if a gang and McDonald's  have the same chart, this human activity of drug dealing is something that can't be prdicted. Thus, this would be called the Freakonomics.
Words in this story
any rich white people / adjectives can be classified into many categories. In English, adjectives are generally used in the order: quantity-->opinion-->size-->age-->shape-->color-->origin-->material-->purpose
hypothesis / theory, theorem, assumption
equilibrium /e・qui・lib・ri・um/ìːkwəlíbriəm/  balance, symmetry
compensating / , make up for, make amends

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