You may remember Sudhir Venkatesh from Freakonomics as the “rogue sociologist” who cozied up to a Chicago drug gang to analyze its social and economic structure—fodder for his 2008 bestseller, Gang Leader for a Day. For his new book, Floating City, Venkatesh, now a professor at Columbia University, spent years following off-the-books workers in New York City, most notably an upper-middle-class madam and an ambitious crack dealer.
As his subjects evolve (or fail to), we get a refreshing glimpse of how they view themselves: as businesspeople trying to improve their craft and grow their clientele. Venkatesh weaves his own story—a new faculty member trying to fit in at an elite university amid marital strife—into the narrative, and readers get to follow him around as he goes about his research.
Mother Jones: In Gang Leader for a Day, you befriend a Chicago drug gang in order to analyze its social and economic structure. In Floating City, your new book, you explore the illegal underground economies of New York City. What was your intention?
Sudhir Venkatesh: We’ve been so enamored with our global cities, and we tend to focus on wealth and sometimes will forget the fact that 99 percent of the population in these cities has a much different experience. So I wanted to uncover that, and more and more I found that in my attempt to do that I had to take the underground economy more seriously. Not only the sex and drugs, which are two economies that are featured prominently here, but also people who are working off the books.
MJ: You wound up profiling people who work illegally, including a madam from a rich family—whom it turned out you knew previously.
SV: I had come in with the classic stereotypes. And those stereotypes are in the academic research as well. But when I went out to find those people, I saw something totally different: white, middle-upper class women coming to New York and dating, sometimes sleeping with people on the side but not making much more money, not necessarily wanting to support a drug habit, not necessarily wanting to leave the trade but looking at it as something that was a legitimate income source for them and something that was helping them become part of New York.
"Rogue Sociologist" Embeds With Prostitutes and Crack Dealers in NYC
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