Dealers

One excellent story that Stephen Levitt told was the balance sheet of a drug-dealing gang.

The idea was simple: Although selling crack cocaine does make quite a bit of money, the leader of the gang always gets the lion's share of the profit - so much so that the actual salary of ordinary dealers (so-called foot soldiers) is rather abysmal. (In Levitt's own description, they've got to live with their mothers.)

Then why do so many young people want to become drug dealers ?

The answer is obviously the (hallucinatory) bright future of becoming the leader of a gang.

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I could not stop smiling while reading this chapter - a similar story is regularly happening in our circle.

I mean, our house officers. (By the way, they are drug dealers !)

You know what, as soon as we were in the final year of the medical school, we realized that the salary of a houseman was actually lower than those working in McDonalds. Nonetheless, calculated as always, our class still very much looked forward for the job.

As I told my classmate, "The paid is hell, but there is hardly any other job in the world that one would sure be promoted in a year - with the salary more than doubled."

The sobering truth is: fewer young people now wish to become a drug dealer because their leaders have much less glory nowadays - the profit has dropped a lot, and the risk of being arrested is higher than ever.

And the same is happening to our fresh graduates ?