Chapter 3: Conventional Wisdom

"Why do drug dealers still live their moms?"
Answer: Because most of them basically make minimum wage.

This chapter takes a shot at "experts" -- people who make their living by explaining or predicting society's probelsm. The ancient world called these people "prophets," and while we in this age of supposed scientific reason may scoff at any comparison, the similarities are surprising.

Take, for example, Mitch Snyder. In the early 1980s he pleaded for more attention for the homeless, and even testified before Congress that the ranks of the homeless were dying at the astounding rate of 45 per second (or about 1.4 billion per year -- more than all of China). He eventually got exposed for the fraud he was, and later killed himself.

The Mitch Snyder case tells as much about journalism as it does experts. Together, they generate a lot of what's called "conventional wisdom." And conventional wisdom is that being a drug dealer pays well, even if there are hazards to the job.

But contrary to conventional wisdom, most drug dealers don't make a lot of money -- or at least, not enough to make it an attractive line of business for those with other options.

These days, dealers might make enough to be worth staying in business, (called "normal" profits), but it's not enough to be worth killing someone (or being killed) over. The "economic" profits of the 80s are long gone.

Back in the 80s and early 90s, things were a little different -- higher level dealers could do pretty well. Therefore, crack-related homocides were frequent, driven mostly by the (literally) cutthroat competition for market share (also called "turf").

Yet even then, a low-level drug dealer could only barely get by. They basically got paid the minimum wage, and had a one-in-four chance of being shot to death. (That, by the way, is a higher mortality rate than sitting on death row in Texas, where in 2003 only 5 percent of the 500 inmates were executed.) But like athletes, they were willing to put in their dues for a shot at the big leagues.

Conventional wisdom (or "groupthink") is often wrong. The man who coined the term, John Kenneth Galbraith, disparagingly explained that people will often "adhere, as to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding" rather than spend time comprehending complex issues which prove "mentally tiring."

In other words, people often believe either what they want to or what's easiest. The person who doesn't want to give money to a street beggar might justify himself by believing it will just go to drugs.

Similarly, our thoughts about Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, WMDs, and just about everything in politics are driven by the shapers conventional wisdom: the "experts." Our opinions on are shaped by them, yet in many cases they have no better idea than anyone else.

So consider this: if you flip a coin 10 times with 1024 watching and making different predictions about how it will land, one person is bound to be right. That 0.1% of the population might look like a genius -- a person worthy to be called an expert -- but his prediction about the next coin toss is no better than anyone else's.