Tyler Cowen calls Sudhir Venkatesh A Dealer in the Ivory Tower:
Beginning in 1989, Sudhir Venkatesh, now a professor at Columbia University, followed around a Chicago gang leader, identified only as J.T., for about six years, ostensibly to complete his sociology Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Though Mr. Venkatesh did draw on his experiences in his dissertation, and in several much-discussed academic papers, the final result of his sojourn is Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets (Penguin Press, 320 pages, $25.95). If you’ve read the best-selling Freakonomics, Mr. Venkatesh should be a familiar figure: He was the guy who hung around young drug dealers, discovered that most of them don’t earn very much money and still live with their mothers, and asked why anyone would get into the business in the first place.
[...]
Mr. Venkatesh himself does not shy away from telling us about the more lurid appeal his project had for him: “By now I had spent about six years hanging out with J.T., and at some level I was pleased that he was winning recognition for his achievements. Such thoughts were usually accompanied by an equally powerful disquietude that I took so much pleasure in the rise of a drug-dealing gangster.”That disquietude did not always prevail. If you’re wondering where the title of the book comes from, Mr. Venkatesh himself spent one day running J.T.’s rounds and collecting payoffs; J.T. wanted to show the researcher just how hard his job was. And indeed, he succeeded. Not surprisingly, Mr. Venkatesh starts to feel that other scholars are “living in a bubble,” and at times these feelings turn to anger at his profession.
Slowly but surely Mr. Venkatesh starts to realize his legal liability. If he is abetting illegal activity, or if he knows of planned crimes, he is potentially an accessory and subject to arrest and imprisonment. “Four years deep into my research, it came to my attention that I might get in a lot of trouble,” Mr. Venkatesh writes, but even this not-so-streetwise reviewer had that worry by page 25 of the narrative. Mr. Venkatesh also realizes that his command of so much information puts him in a dangerous position. The criminals know that he can be forced to testify against them, and eventually Mr. Venkatesh has to tell them that, unlike a journalist, a researcher has no confidentiality protection from the probing hand of the law. It surprises this reader that he survived the experience without even as much as a good beating; presumably this was due to the protection of J.T., who vouched for him. It is disquieting to learn that the danger is not just from the criminals: Gang members warn him, above all else, not to write about the police. They tell him that the police don’t want to be watched or chronicled, and that, yes, they will retaliate.