projects, but most of them still lived at home with their moms. And then you may have scratched your head and said, "Why is that?" The answer lies in finding the right data, and the secret to finding the right data usually means finding the right person-more easily said than done. Drug dealers are rarely trained in economics, and economists rarely hang out with crack dealers. So the answer to this question begins with finding someone who did live among the drug dealers and managed to walk away with the secrets of their trade.       Sudhir Venkatesh-his boyhood friends called him Sid, but he has since reverted to Sudhir-was born in India, raised in the suburbs of upstate New York and southern California, and graduated from the University of California at San Diego with a degree in mathematics. In 1989 he began to pursue his PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago. He was interested in understanding how young people form their identities; to that end, he had just spent three months following the Grateful Dead around the country. What he was not interested in was the grueling fieldwork that typifies sociology. But his graduate advisor, the eminent poverty scholar William Julius Wilson, promptly sent Venkatesh into the field. His assign- ment: to visit Chicagos poorest black neighborhoods with a clipboard and a seventy-question, multiple-choice survey. This was the first question on the survey:   How do you feel about being black and poor?   a. Very bad b. Bad c. Neither bad nor good d. Somewhat good e. Very good