Customer Reviews

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Some books are informative. And some books are eye-opening. This book is eye-opening. Read it and you will learn many fascinating things you never dreamed were going on....

...unless you already live in a highly urbanized/disadvantaged neighborhood.

The author is an enterprising young academic who is drawn to the firsthand study of life in such neighborhoods. Being of mixed race "gave me (the author) an indeterminate and unthreatening presence" by which he could spend months with the residents - enough time to understand life and the economy there with more thoroughness than perhaps ever before.

The underground economy in this corner of America is woven into every fabric of life. You learn first hand about enterprises running the gamut from the homeless fellow who does reliable auto repair in back alleys and side streets, to the (no surprise here) sex workers and drug sellers, to the stay at home mom that cooks meals for local residents, shopkeepers and even the police.

You learn how the local gang leader is not simply a lawless soul feared by all, but a broker of influence upon which even the most upstanding residents come to rely.

With so much disadvantage built into the neighborhood you come to understand how everyone learns to accept shady economic dealings out of the joint recognition of the need to survive. But when such dealings bring a larger than acceptable threat to the children and residents, then the gang leader is often brought in to broker a deal to return things to homeostasis.

As a white suburbanite here is what struck me the most. There is waaaaay more tolerance and acceptance among neighbors in the ghetto than there is in suburbia. There is waaaaay more neighbor involvement and mutual reliance in the ghetto than in suburbia. In fact, instead of the ongoing competition so often found in the suburbs, the ghetto is characterized by the opposite - genuine concern for and involvement with one's neighbors.

Is it a great place to live? Of course not. I mean, any world where you have to call on the gang leader to broker safety in the streets for kids must be a risky world.

But as the book will teach you, there is a richness, mutual acceptance, and mutual protection that would be envied in the safer suburbs. Not to mention a level of economic enterprise that outsiders - until now - had no idea existed.

As I said at the beginning, some books teach you additional things about something you already know. This book teaches you about something (you will admit by page 10) you almost certainly know nothing.

40 years ago, Jane Jacobs influenced generations of planners and urban policy makers with her "Death and Life of Great American Cities," a sensitive and sensible portrait of how great cities work as social organisms. Jacobs turned 60 years of urban policy on its head and gave birth to a new way of thinking about cities and how to solve their problems: by celebrating and encouraging their social fabric, rather than dividing it with freeways and public housing projects. Since Jacobs' work, American cities have seen a great resurgance in their central cores. But today they are more divided than ever between rich and poor. While America's central cities are seeing more investment and interest than ever before, those same central cities are also home to deepening poverty and despair.

Sudhir Venkatesh has produced a startlingly honest portrayal of how this "other half" the American urban experience really works. While Jacobs saw density as the answer to the city's problems rather than the cause of them, Venkatesh examines what happens when the density of the city meets deep generational poverty. In a world where everyone is engaged in everyday survival, the "eyes and ears" that Jacobs celebrated as the ultimate contol over social behavior become, in Venkatesh's analysis, the mechnism of regulation of a vast underground, off the books economy. The neighborhoods Venkatesh studies are places that are ignored and forgotten by the larger society, places where resources are scarce and where the very definition of "right and wrong" is colored by the need to survive, to put food on the table, to make rent.

Venkatesh provides a refreshingly non-ideological study into how the urban poor really live. He avoids glamorizing the lives of underground, criminal actors, and avoids moralizing or grandstanding. Rather, he tells us the realities and consequences of the economic decisions of those residing in America's poor central cities. This book is a must-read for anyone who cares about the state of our cities. It reveals the hidden order beneath the apparent choas of the ghetto. By defining how the ghetto works, Venkatesh may well have started a much-needed conversation on how what we can do to make sure it works differently.

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh has the potencial for a really good book here, but he mucks it up by switching back and forth between being an objective social scientist reporting his findings and a sympathetic visitor to the urban American slum. His digressions into obscure and arcane points of academic theory interrupt the narrative flow and make the book a tedious read at times.

With that minor quibble stated however, Off the Books is a very enlightening survey of the seemingly intractable problems facing the population of America's ghettos. I highly recommend it to the people who promote laissez-faire economic policies as a cure-all for urban social pathologies.

Saw Venkatesh's book on Slate's list of the best of 2006 and looked forward to reading it after picking it up.

I was disappointed, but I'll confess that I think I was expecting too much. With all due respect to Venkatesh, who is a professor of sociology and African-American Studies, this book would have been much more enjoyable in the hands of a commercial (versus academic) writer.

The subject matter holds great potential and the research is exhaustive, maybe no commercial author could have provided the insight and won the access that the author did, but I found the book redundant and the treatment oversimple - some analysis of what drives an underground economy (barriers of education, criminal history, etc.) and how it takes shape (the licit vs. illicit side, barter, entrepeneurship, criminal racketeering, etc.) is important, but here its overwrought, and the book winds up being too long and too light.

Venkatesh endlessly returns to labored insights on the clockwork of the "shady economy," and to his obvious sympathy and compassion for his subjects. The latter is emotional and political and is manifest throughout the book - and it is crippling.

A characteristic example exists in the laughable introduction of "Bird," one of the book's plucky heroes, a local mother who Venkatesh describes as "working...sixty to seventy hours a week" as a prostitute.

Sadly, for me, there wasn't a lot new here, still Venkatesh seems to want to make this about politics, public policy, and race. But the fact is that there is little here that wasn't equally applicable to the underworld economies of Capone's Chicago and many others throughout time and across the world.

In fact, one of the book's real weaknesses is in its insular focus and failure to find or make salient comparisons - especially to the global ghetto economies that dwarf Chicago's Maquis Park trade in both volume and sophistication.

As a slice of life, this is an interesting read. It offered little more for me and failed to rise to the level of rewarding scholarly nonfiction.

JAW

I'll try not to repeat what the other reviewers have already said and
just express my opinion on the book.

It is sad but all too true that the poor seldom speak for
themselves. And even though they may live a few blocks away, it
requires a prolonged ethnographic study like Venkatesh's to get
the picture of their daily lives and economic relations.

And the picture he paints is indeed fascinating. Sterile academic
words like "gang activity" or "narcotics" that Venkatesh uses contrast
with the stark reality and the daily struggle that the urban
downtrodden have to lead. This is probably the single most important
reason to read this book. The book provides a comprehensive survey to
the twisted economic and social life of the "shady world": there is a
chapter on "soccer moms", on business people, on street hustlers, the
preachers and on the street gangs. However, the main feel that I got
for Marquis Park is that of a place of crushing poverty and
despair. The anecdotes and live situations are bizarre yet possess
their own underlying logic: a gang leader as a person to turn to to
mediate conflicts; a garage owner paying his mechanics with used radio
equipment instead of cash; a church leader "placing" his parishioners
into the homes of the affluent, getting a cut of their wages and then
"rotating" them to make sure they do not lose their dependence on him;
the small business owners fostering relationships with each other
through small loans to secure against tough economic circumstance; the
same business owners are afraid to operate outside the ghetto because
the operating environment is so insecure and the relationships inside
the community provide the meager support in case of hard times. It is
breathtaking how the residents of Marquis Park completely gave up on
the safety net of the modern state and, as in primitive societies,
rely on their children to provide care and support in their old age.

The author's sympathy towards his subjects shows often in the book and
make it a far more pleasurable read. However, this comes with a lot
of effort on the reader's part. Venkatesh writing style is circular
and repetitive. The book starts from the death of the gang leader and
ends with it. This would be a nice narrative device if it were not for
mind-numbing continuous retreading over the same thoughts, ideas and
facts. And it is not that Venkatesh repeats himself word-for-word but
he just goes over the same territory and re-references or re-stresses
or reiterates ad nauseam. At some point I started treating the books
as a primary source --- a witness account rather than a synthetic
scholarly work. Another major complaint is the scatterbrained treatment
of the material. With all the repetition, some of the important
economic background and the history of the formation of the ghetto is
tucked in somewhere in the middle of the book. For example, the ghetto
got so poor because most of the blue color jobs that the ghetto
residents used to be able to get were shipped overseas. This fact is
mentioned offhandedly in the introduction of one of the middle
chapters.

Another major annoyance is the lack of numbers and statistics in the
book. How difficult was it to state what the number of people in
Marquis Park was? How many of them actually migrate out of it? It
seems that there is a constant outflow of people. What is their
average income? How does it compare to the other American inner
cities? What are the economic dynamics of it? They have become poorer
in the last twenty years, but by how much? The author claims there is
no adequate policing. How many policemen are there per resident? How
does it compare to other parts of the city? The author claims there is
overcrowding. How many square feet are there per resident? and so on.
At last it would not have hurt this book to provide some sort of an
idea of what is required to better the lot of the residents of Marquis
Park.

Robert Daniels review is useful. What stayed with me on this book is that we have let our urban poor down, over and over, and while they have created an underground community and a web of relationships that span the licit and illicit, they will never rise above that bare bones existence in the absence of substantial structured help.

The author draws on others to estimate that this community across the land could be responsible for at least 75 billion a year in unpaid taxes.

A few vital phrases:

"no one took (even) a few dollars for granted."

this is a community with an intricate set of protocols for survival on the edge of the law and the edge of the economy

clergy plays a critical role as both brokers and clients for services; mothers as single heads of households are part of block committees that can negotiate complex and very specific arrangements with gangs, police, and others.

$50 in food stamps was worth (2001-2003) $75 in car repairs or $30 in beer.

The webs of relationships overcome any differences between licit and illicit. ANY form of income is respected and prized.

Informal credit a necessary social capital that replaced structured credit.

The night spaces are used by traders, regulators, and predators.

The chapter on the priests and block mothers was especially great. The author identified three blocks of preachers doing three different roles: brokering disputes in the illicit and licit local world; serving as part time work or exchange brokers for the working poor; and serving as outreach to the police and other communities, e.g. the adjacent white middle class community whose preachers could pass the word on available service jobs with specific families.

The bottom line is clear: even the most desperate, if they are resilient, can survive and find some form of happiness, but we have let them down. As I write this, Wall Street is giving out tens of billions in bonuses to its employees, the US Government is mounting the worst deficit and combined national debt in history, and the Navy and the Air Force are continuing to demand new carriers and long-range bombers while our troops on the ground lack showers, hot food, comfortable quarters, and safe vehicles--as well as an attentive responsible government (at the top--I never mean to be critical of the good people trapped in this terribly screwed up mess we call the federal government).

This is a serious useful accomplishment. Other books I recommend include ILLICIT by Moises Naim, "The Working Poor" by David Shipler, "Nickled and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich, and "The Global Class War" by Jeff Faux, see my reviews of each for a quick insight into those authors' very valuable complementary views.

My only dismay is that this book is missing the icing. I would have loved to see some figures, maps, charts that visualized the substance. The comparison of the value of food stamps to car repair to beer is priceless. Most of these people barely made $750 a month. I sense that the author was exhausted by this effort and slowed to a walk as the book came to completion--should it be re-issued, and I expect it will be as I consider it to be scholarship of lasting value, I would like to see some really excellent charts, extrapolations, and visualizations.

A really fine piece of work, well worth reading along with the other books mentioned above.

See also, with reviews:
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich
All the Money in the World: How the Forbes 400 Make--and Spend--Their Fortunes

First off, getting the criticism out of the way, the organization and pacing of this book is slightly cantankerous, with instances of logical loopbacks and digressions. It can be slightly frustrating.

What will carry you through is the fact that the subject matter is engrossing. The dynamics of the economic system described are fascinating and synch well with experiences I had living in West Philly, illuminating instances that where puzzling to me. The character studies of his informants are deftly drawn, giving the reader a feel not just for the motivations of the participants in this system, but for who they are as people.

Which, in the end, is the best reason to read this book. It takes one of the most pernicious social stereotypes in American culture, the anti-puritan, the loafing, poor, (insert racial epithet) trash that leeches from the system, and casts it aside. Might some of the behavior of the participants be seen in this light, it can and undoubtedly is. But there is much more going on, as there is always much more going on, than what our deeply seated cultural short-hands allow for. Kudos to Mr. Venkatesh for providing a portrait of a marginalized social group doing what it needs to do to get by and, in their hopes if not their reality, try to get ahead.

This book is about the illicit or "shady" economic activity of people living in "Maquis Park", a poor black neighborhood in Chicago's Southside. The activities Venkatesh includes range from otherwise legitimate enterprises such as auto repair or lunch preparation and delivery performed without proper licensing and permits (and often on public property) to barter of services or products to employing workers (often temporary) off the books to clear illegalities such as drug and gun sales, prostitution, protection rackets and loan sharking.

Venkatesh spent years studying and hanging out in Maquis Park, even participating in the shady economy there, and he provides exhaustive anecdotal description of what he observed. The individual stories and observations are fascinating (if perhaps a bit repetitious). Several other reviewers have described the book in some detail.

But several factors lead me to reduce and otherwise five star rating to four. First, there does not seem to be any overarching synthesis, any theory developed from the data, beyond some general observations as to the residents' resilience. [The one exception that struck me was that Venkatesh does emphasize that the economic calculus within the community is very different from that taught in college classes or employed in the corporate world, and effects the choices made in ways that make sense in context, but may seem pathological to outside commentators.] In particular, there is little comparison with the (underground) economies of poor communities of other ethnicity in inner cities, nor among the rural poor, nor even in working class and suburban neighborhoods (think how many roofers, gardeners or other contractors will give a special rate for cash, or employ workers of unclear documentation). This would be a bit less annoying if Venkatesh did not seem to speak as if his experience, his studied community, were universal, "the" poor.

And the writing. Sometimes it seems hard to find a page without some awkwardness, typo, or simple careless writing which should have been edited. My favorite has to be on page 89, "In suburban ... communities ... there are fewer people per capita...." Er, fewer people per person? Then on page 92, among the variety of "in-kind payments" offered for car repair, he includes "a few have an installment plan" (if they're paying *money* on the installment plan it's not in-kind). Page 111, "supplies, such as ... cleaning services". Then in one paragraph, on page 120, Venkatesh writes (a) "A single individual owns 75 percent of the stores" when he means 75 percent of the stores are owned by individuals, not that one person owns a whole mess of stores, (b) refers to "the 'glass ceiling' that has prevented women from entering the halls of corporate America" [that would be a 'glass wall', wouldn't it?] and (c) "although ... there are a few women who own ... stores ... they are few in number." [Well, 'a few' would be 'few in number', wouldn't it?] Call me a grump, but this kind of writing brings me to a squelching halt, repeatedly, while I figure out what he's trying to say, or just mutter a 'tsk tsk'. Surely Harvard U Press could hire an English grad student at a few bucks an hour to read this stuff.

In sum, lots of good stuff in this book, but diminished by some flaws.

Off The Books is a fine, readable description of one neighborhood in the south side if Chicago. The concentration is on the economic life of the adults, but of course ends up covering social, political, and legal aspects of the residents. There's enough gritty detail to keep up the reader's voyeuristic interest in "the baddest part of town", and enough highfalutin scholarly language to maintain academic respectability.

The author has consciously used his ethnicity, neither white nor Black, to learn the deals, the arrangements, the profits and losses of participants in the underground economy of his chosen subject area. It's an interesting subject, honorably researched and respectably presented. Minus two stars for dragging things out, and sloppy English. Definitely recommended if this is your field. Might be good for a general reader.

I bought this book along with 9 others in one my fits of learning-passion. I decided to read this book first, and I'm glad I did. Dr. Venkatesh remarkably spent 8-odd years hanging around a dangerous south-side ghetto to see what it was actually like to do business there. The book is--like other reviewers have mentioned--a bit longer than it needs to be, and the organization could have been different. I like my nuggets of analysis to happen predictably, and while there was no shortage of brilliant analysis, in this book it's scattered through the book like tomatoes in guacamole.

What you get from Dr. Vankatesh's observations and analysis is a creation of a world that is set apart. You don't realize how isolated inner-city ghettos are until you realize how many forces are applied in order to insulate their inhabitants. It's not just that jobs are hard to come by, it's that even the "legitimate" jobs don't contain exit strategies. Socially and economically, even 9-5 ghetto workers still get stuck and "have" to stay. I put "have" in quotation marks because they don't literally have to stay: they aren't held down by chains. Yet to read Dr. Vanketash's book is to understand the tragedy of inner-city life, which is it's intense gravitational pull. The connections you make in the ghetto economy and the social rules which govern those relations actually do help in those impoverished neighborhoods. But they don't fly in mainstream society. It's akin to prisoners who rule the pen but then come out to learn that mainstream society doesn't care how big your muscles are or whose insignia you've got tattooed on your neck. This is why the justice-system is broken, it's lack of relation to the outside world. It's also why the ghetto is broken. It has no relation to the outside world except, "You stay over there, away from us."

In reality it's much more complicated than that, but you should read Dr. Vankatesh's book to see how. I recommend it.