I picked up Venkatesh's book _Gang Leader for a Day_ on the strength of the work cited here ... and ended up throwing it out.

He's not an economist: he has a very clear idea of which jobs are useful in a society and which jobs aren't, and no interest at all in what the market has to say.

I'm sure he has useful data, but everything he writes goes through that filter, and there's no way to trust what he says about people dealing drugs, because he makes it so clear that everyone doing anything outside the law is Evil, and so everything they do is tainted.