Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh

Our third book is Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh.

You can download The Better Angels of our Nature here:

ENGLISH (USA): http://amzn.to/1KXyla6

Feel free to discuss it in the comments here, but please keep all conversation relevant to this book.

Reviews:

As a Chicagoan I found this book to be fascinating but also depressing. It's clear the gang leaders have no reason to stop their behavior and we'll never put an end to the violence here.

Is it possibe to (also) have a Q&A with J.T.? I noticed that most of the questions I have about this book would be directed at him (since we already get such a good insight into what's going on in Sudhir's head). Would be very nice!

Extremely interesting narrative of gang life in Chicago. It is amazing the level of interaction that takes place in order to mitigate the horrible circumstances of life in the low income housing projects. It is more than just the gang members, but also the housing authority, welfare agencies and police involvement in daily life. It is so very complex and Sudhir was indeed fortunate to be allowed the freedom to interact with all of them for so long. I was disappointed that he did not offer ideas for ways that the people could be helped better than the corrupt officials and the equally corrupt community leaders were doing in his narrative. The book ended by just tailing off into nothingness. I thought the author might have had something more substantial in the way of suggestions or policy ideas. But all in all a very interesting read.

I wasn't finished reading the first chapter and I recommended it to family. I have family that lived in both Robert Taylor and Lake Park many years ago. So, it will be interesting to read another perspective of what life was like there.

The idea from the previous book The Better Angels of Our Nature that one reason why violence declines is that we have a "leviathan", a state who ensures security and enforces laws is brilliantly illustrated in Gang Leader For A Day. In the Robert Taylor ghetto, "police won't go and the ambulance won't come". So the people there need to look out for themselves. In the absence of official law enforcement, violence peaks and to have a bit more security and stability, people turn to the drug gang to take that role. Even the protection from JT's violent gang is better than no "leviathan" who would hold the monopoly of power. One lesson I take from having read both books is that I realise once more how important it is that basic security and stability is provided. It helps decrease violence and make for a better life especially in difficult circumstances such as the ghetto or in failed or corrupt states. If we want to decrease violence and help provide a safer world and empower people in difficult circumstances to prosper, we need to provide security and stability first.

Wondering how internalized oppression perpetuates the existence and importance of gangs. Also, how can we redirect this inherent need to belong as well as assumption of an identity accepted by peers into something more constructive and positive? Enjoying the book very much so far

I haven't read this book, but my eyes were opened to another world when I started working for the local welfare/social services and saw soldiers in line getting their food stamps in the early 1990's...in our country this happens!

This is a great book and a classic urban ethnography. If you like this, some other sociologists that are a good read are: Elliot Liebow, Elijah Anderson, and (I hear) Alice Goffman.

This book is a New York Times Bestseller with a foreword by Stephen J. Dubner, coauthor of Freakonomics. Gang Leader for a Day also tells the story of the complicated friendship that develops between Venkatesh and JT--two young and ambitious men a universe apart.

This book is definitely an interesting read, particularly if you are not from the wrong side of the tracks. For most middle and upper class readers, I believe this is an insightful and voyueristic view of the lives that are so often forgotten about in this country.

Having grown up on the wrong side of the tracks and having lived in the projects for a time, I found myself deeply conflicted by the author's portrayal of others and himself. In the end he is only somewhat honest with himself about being the biggest hustler of all in the book. How exactly do you eat people's food and sit on their couches and follow them around for six years and in the end say you weren't even friends? Is this simply artificial distance inserted to make himself seem more scholarly, or does he really feel this way about the people who greatly contributed to his career? He tries to distinguish himself from the very people he interacted with and at times participated in morally questionable behavior with by describing himself as dressing appropriately for an Ivy League professor while returning to visit the ghetto. This description of himself at the end of the book brought home sharply to me the reality that most people will take a look at this world, like the author, and then put it down and walk away from the very real needs that real Americans have and it left me frustrated and angry. For every person who makes it out, there are hundreds left behind and most people are unwilling or unable to do anything except close a book and forget. I highly question that anything will be done as a result of this work to significantly improve impoverished Americans' situations, a view that the author confirms

Thus Reggie, a Chicago gang member, warned the author of this book. Thank goodness, Venkatesh wasn't frightened away, and the consequence is this narrative about a Chicago crack-dealing gang.

I first learned something about life in a Chicago housing project when I read David Isay's heartbreaking Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago (1999), and something about the street drug trade in David Simons and Edward Burns' grueling The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1998). Both have become classics. Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day is, I believe, destined to join them as an on-the-spot narrative of gang culture of Chicago. Some of the people whose lives he tracks--J.T., Clarisse, Mama and Pops Patton, Reggie, Millie, T-Bone--grow on you until you feel as if you actually know them.

While a graduate student at the University of Chicago, weary of cold statistical analysis, Venkatesh began hanging out with the Black Kings, a crack-selling gang who headquartered in the Robert Taylor Homes projects. He wanted to get in touch with the gang subculture through direct observation. He entered into the project pretty naive and just a bit too full of himself. Seven years later, after following the Black Kings and establishing a relationship with their leader, one J.T., the things he'd seen and heard made him a lot more streetwise and a little less cocky.

During his seven-year study, "Mr. Professor," as J.T.'s mother initially called Venkatesh, learned that Chicago gangs, or at least J.T.'s outfit, lived in a culture of violence and machismo, but also functioned in an unexpected way as police in their own territory. From the perspective of society, they were lawbreakers

The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker

The second book will be 'The Better Angels of our Nature' by Steven Pinker

You can download The Better Angels of our Nature here:

ENGLISH (USA): http://amzn.to/1OGgXui

ENGLISH (UK): http://goo.gl/Dq9q3I

SPANISH: http://goo.gl/CsWTG4

ITALIANO: http://goo.gl/Yz1KXd

DEUTSCH: http://goo.gl/Xwfalv

It's a timely book about how and why violence has steadily decreased throughout our history, and how we can continue this trend.

Recent events might make it seem like violence and terrorism are more common than ever, so it's worth understanding that all violence -- even terrorism -- is actually decreasing over time. If we understand how we are achieving this, we can continue our path towards peace.
A few people I trust have told me this is the best book they've ever read. It's a long book, so I plan on taking a month to read it rather than two weeks. I'll add a third book in two weeks that will be a shorter read to complement this.

If you want to follow along with the books I'm reading and participate in conversations with the authors, you can like the page A Year of Books 2015.

Reviews of The Better Angels of Our Nature Book

"My favorite book of the last decade is [Steven] Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature. It is a long but profound look at the reduction in violence and discrimination over time."--Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft

"For anyone interested in human nature, the material is engrossing, and when the going gets heavy, Pinker knows how to lighten it with ironic comments and a touch of humor. . . . A supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement."

(The New York Times Book Review)

"An extraordinary range of research . . . a masterly effort."

(The Wall Street Journal)

"Better Angels is a monumental achievement. His book should make it much harder for pessimists to cling to their gloomy vision of the future. Whether war is an ancient adaptation or a pernicious cultural infection, we are learning how to overcome it."

(Slate)

Praise for THE STUFF OF THOUGHT
“The majesty of Pinker’s theories is only one side of the story.  The other side is the modesty of how he built them.  It all makes sense, when you look at it the right way.”

(The New York Times Book Review)

 “Packed with information, clear, witty, attractively written …”

(The New York Review of Books)

“Engaging and witty …Everyone with an interest in language and how it gets to be how it is—that is, everyone interested in how we get to be human and do our human business—should read THE STUFF OF THOUGHT.”

(Science)

Praise for THE BLANK SLATE

“An extremely good book—clear, well argued, fair, learned, tough, witty, humane, stimulating.” 

(Colin McGinn, The Washington Post)

“Sweeping, erudite, sharply argued, and fun to read…also highly persuasive.”

(Time)

About the Author (Steven Pinker)

Steven Pinker is one of the world's leading authorities on language and the mind. His popular and highly praised books include The Stuff of Thought, The Blank Slate, Words and Rules, How the Mind Works, and The Language Instinct. The recipient of several major awards for his teaching, books, and scientific research, Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He also writes frequently for The New York Times, Time, The New Republic, and other magazines.

The End of Power by Moisés Naim

Our first book will be The End of Power by Moisés Naim.

Feel free to discuss it in the comments here, but please keep all conversation relevant to this book.

You can download The End of Power here

ENGLISH (USA): http://amzn.to/1N1bjTl

ENGLISH (UK): http://goo.gl/n9yxXS

SPANISH: http://goo.gl/2s5209

ITALIANO: http://goo.gl/eP9feJ

DEUTSCH: http://goo.gl/UrqDTM

Whatever our political ideologies, most of us are aware that we've entered one of those periods of accelerated change that mark the transition from one historical era to another. In the last dozen years we've had the War on International Terror, the Great Recession, public and private sector financial collapses, and a change in politics that has shifted the country from ultra-laissez faire economic conservatism toward a slightly left-of-center regime of higher taxes, more regulation, and more federally-supervised healthcare.

These changes may be viewed through many economic and political prisms. This book views it through what is purported to be a change in the power structures that govern politics, business, the military, and even religion. As author Moises Naim posits: "Power is decaying. To put it simply, power no longer buys as much as it did in the past."

My first thought is that this is deja vu back to the late 60's/mid 70's when a plethora of books like MEGATRENDS and FUTURE SHOCK predicted that "The Establishment" would soon be overthrown by an explosion of knowledge, communication, and rising social consciousness among the people, especially the young. The Establishment was alleged to be a cabal of large corporate and academic interests allied with big government for the purpose of suppressing the desires of the "little people" to have a greater share of economic and political influence.

Something along these lines did happen on a limited scale. Grass roots environmentalists did combine to thwart powerful corporate interests and their political allies. Young people, women, and minorities did take over the Democratic Party in 1972 and oust its old guard. In foreign affairs some ragtag guerilla movements, notably the Viet Cong and the Afghan resistance, did force the humiliating withdrawals of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. superpowers

But the trends mostly went the OPPOSITE of what was predicted. The minor political parties faded away so that today we have an even more entrenched major party duopoly. Most of those thousands of new entrepreneurial companies spawned by the revolution in computer information were bought up and consolidated into the existing corporate oligarchies. Today America's industries, banks, and tech companies are more concentrated into "too big to fail" behemoths than ever before.

Nor did the "little guys" do especially well on the international stage. Instead of the world slipping away from dominance by the old US/NATO and USSR/Warsaw Pact Superpower blocs, we now have a world dominated by the U.S. and China. Most of the middling powers that were supposed to rise are actually LESS influential now than they were in the 1970s. The European Union and Japan are seen as has-beens, while the other rising powers like India and Brazil are still decades away from becoming world-class powers.

The author's thesis that the balance of military power has shifted from nation states to irregular forces is also dubious:

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Indeed, when nation-states go to war these days, big military power delivers less than it once did. Wars are not only increasingly asymmetric, pitting large military forces against smaller, nontraditional ones such as insurgents, separatist movements, and militias. They are also increasingly being won by the militarily weaker side.
============

And yet it hasn't been an especially bright time for guerilla movements. The big ones like Al Qaeda, Hamas, and the Colombian FARC have been all but exterminated by local governments allied with the U.S. Russia and China have suppressed their home-grown terrorists. The world may be more secure from terrorist attack than at any time since international terrorism first erupted in the mid 1970s.

I also wonder if the author is correct about the passing of power from the major parties to fringe groups:

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In the United States, the rise of the Tea Party movement-- far from unorganized, but also very far from any traditional political organization-- boosted candidates like Christine O'Donnell, who allegedly dabbled in witchcraft
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But in truth the Tea party was effective in only ONE election in 2010. Tea Party backed candidates were obliterated in the electoral route of 2012 when they lost 21 of 23 contested Senate seats. The Tea Party seems to have no more staying power than other short-lived fringe parties like those that backed Ross Perot in 1992 or Ralph Nader in 2000.

I'm also skeptical of the idea that the major financial exchanges will lose their market-making power to upstarts:

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IN SUM, NEW ENTRANTS SUCH AS HEDGE FUNDS, NEW STOCK EXCHANGES, dark pools, and previously unknown start-ups that suddenly upend an entire industry are harbingers of things to come: more volatility, more fragmentation, competition, and more micropowers able to constrain the possibilities of the megaplayers.
========

The financial markets will probably continue to be dominated by the established exchanges except that they will become more regulated. I am guessing that hedge funds, which have accomplished little other than making their managers obscenely wealthy while losing their investors' money on crazy speculations, will fade away. As the economy gains traction people will go back to investing in the traditional buy-and-hold way instead of imagining that hedge fund charlatans will make them fortunes with exotic investment derivatives that usually fail.

I also don't believe that big government will be losing its grip on power any time soon. Didn't we just get through imposing government supervision over one-sixth of the economy via the Affordable Care Act? And, if anything, hasn't the economic crash strengthened the G20 governments by making their Federal Reserve Banks the ultimate backstop against global financial calamity?

Thus, I question many of Naim's assumptions. I do think the power of big corporations is going to be reined it, but it will be reined in by government, not by upstart competitors. Competition sure didn't do anything to drive down healthcare costs, so now we have government intervention into the sector. My estimation is that the people will demand that the government extend its umbrella over a private sector that is seen by the public as being too chaotic, volatile, and prone to systemic failure.

I see the world moving opposite to the way Naim predicts: toward the ENHANCED power of government enforcing an umbrella of stability over big corporations. I'm not a fan of ossified big government bureaucracies that tax everybody to death while stifling innovation with mind-numbing red tape and bureaucratic delays. But I do see the private sector being placed in a relatively weaker position after the 2008 financial collapse, and of government retaining the position that it has grown into since then. That means a cozier relationship between the concentrated power centers of big government and big business rather than a lessening of them.

On the International front I would guess that the U.S.A. and China will continue to exercise a superpower duopoly far stronger than the old US/USSR duopoly. Perhaps eventually other emerging powers in South America, Africa, South Asia, and the Arab World will rise to make the "multi-polar" world, but that will probably happen later rather than sooner, if happens at all.

I could certainly be wrong about these conclusions, and that is why this book should be read. Other readers may come to the same conclusions as Naim does. And Naim does recognize that power is a nebulous concept. He seems to be saying (paraphrasing): "in the future the powerful will still be powerful, but less so." Thus, the book should be read as an opinion piece to stimulate the reader to deepen his/her thinking about the direction of change the U.S. and global political and economic systems are moving in as we get back on our feet from the shocks of the early 2000's. The book is very well written and Naim has a talent for making complex concepts of power easy to assimilate. Regardless of your conclusions you'll enjoy reading this book if you have any substantial interest in U.S. and international business and political trends.

Review

“Who is in charge? This book says nobody. The monopolies of coercion that characterised states, the potency of advanced militaries, the media organisations that controlled information, and the religious institutions that defined orthodoxy are all losing control. Readers may disagree; they will be provoked.”
—Financial Times, Best of the Year 

“It’s not just that power shifts from one country to another, from one political party to another, from one business model to another, Naim argues; it’s this: “Power is decaying.”
—Gordon M. Goldstein, Washington Post, Notable Non-Fiction Book of the Year

“A remarkable new book by the remarkable Moises Naim, the former editor of Foreign Policy. It was recommended to me by former president Bill Clinton during a brief conversation on the situation in Egypt.”
—Richard Cohen, Washington Post

"In his new book called The End of Power, Moises Naim goes so far as to say that power is actually decaying. I actually find the argument rather persuasive."
—General Martin Dempsey-Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

"I particularly enjoyed The End of Power by Moisés Naim.... It is particularly relevant for big institutions like GE."
—Jeff Immelt, CEO, GE

“[An] altogether mind-blowing and happily convincing treatise about how 'power is becoming more feeble, transient, and constrained.'"
—Nick Gillespie, Barron's

“Moisés Naím’s The End of Power offers a cautionary tale to would-be Lincolns in the modern era. Naím is a courageous writer who seeks to dissect big subjects in new ways. At a time when critics of overreaching governments, big banks, media moguls and concentrated wealth decry the power of the '1%,' Mr. Naím argues that leaders of all types—political, corporate, military, religious, union—face bigger, more complex problems with weaker hands than in the past.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Analytically sophisticated…[a] highly original, inter-disciplinary meditation on the degeneration of international power… The End of Power makes a truly important contribution, persuasively portraying a compelling dynamic of change cutting across multiple game-boards of the global power matrix.”
—Washington Post

“This fascinating book...should provoke a debate about how to govern the world when more and more people are in charge.”
—Foreign Affairs

“Naím produces a fascinating account of the way states, corporations and traditional interest groups are finding it harder to defend their redoubts… (He) makes his case with eloquence.”
—Financial Times

“The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn't What It Used to Be is a wide-ranging, stimulating romp through the last 20 years or so in search of a universal explanation for the unraveling of the well-ordered, predictable postwar world of the late 20th century.”
—National Catholic Reporter

“A timely and timeless book.”
—Booklist

“Having served as editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy and the executive director of the World Bank, Naím knows better than most what power on a global scale looks like…. [A] timely, insightful, and eloquent message.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Foreign Policy editor-in-chief Naím argues that global institutions of power are losing their ability to command respect. Whether considering institutions of government, military, religion or business, the author believes their power to be in the process of decaying…. A data-packed, intriguing analysis.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“The End of Power will change the way you read the news, the way you think about politics, and the way you look at the world.”
—William Jefferson Clinton

“In my own experience as president of Brazil I observed first hand many of the trends that Naím identifies in this book, but he describes them in a way that is as original as it is delightful to read. All those who have power—or want it—should read this book.”
—Fernando Henrique Cardoso

“Moisés Naím’s extraordinary new book will be of great interest to all those in leadership positions—business executives, politicians, military officers, social activists and even religious leaders. Readers will gain a new understanding of why power has become easier to acquire and harder to exercise. The End of Power will spark intense and important debate worldwide.”
—George Soros

“After you read The End of Power you will see the world through different eyes. Moisés Naím provides a compelling and original perspective on the surprising new ways power is acquired, used, and lost—and how these changes affect our daily lives."
—Arianna Huffington

“Moisés Naím is one of the most trenchant observers of the global scene. In The End of Power, he offers a fascinating new perspective on why the powerful face more challenges than ever. Probing into the shifting nature of power across a broad range of human endeavors, from business to politics to the military, Naím makes eye-opening connections between phenomena not usually linked, and forces us to re-think both how our world has changed and how we need to respond.”
—Francis Fukuyama

Welcome to my book club

We will read a new book every two weeks and discuss it here. Our books will emphasize learning about new cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies. Suggestions for new books to read are always welcome. We ask that everyone who participates read the books and we will moderate the discussions and group membership to keep us on topic.