Venkatesh’s new book is a fun and interesting read (Cowen’s comments, and Slate’s review). In case you don’t know Venkatesh is the guy who wrote the drugs chapter in Levitt’s Freakonomics. The new book goes further into the urban underground with ethnography. Basically he just moved into the hood, and observed the world around him through the lenses of social science and economics.
What better a lense than Austrian economics? If you’re like me and you believe that Austrians have a unique and powerful ability to explain why things happen the way they do, then this would seem like a great method to link up with Austrian theory. Here are a brief list of research projects I’d love to see performed with a similar Venkatesh, “just do it,” ethnographic approach:

1. Crime
We have several ethnographic studies of crime that try to understand and model the rationality of criminal behaviors. These guys take game theory and Becker’s rational criminals and go to town on the world around them. Kaminski goes inside the prison showing a game theory world of strategy and rational play. And less ethnographic studies have research mafia history (1 and 2). But where are the studies of the other half of crime, the cops, the jailers, the wardens and the lawyers. Do they not also respond rationally and strategically to incentives? It seems like there’s an obvious barrier to getting access to the criminal element of the equation but what’s to stop the motivated researcher from going through the police academy, volunteering at a correctional facility, or interviewing any number of employees in the enforcement chain?
2. The Lot Scene
The Greatful Dead are long gone but they have left a lasting legacy on the folk and jam band scenes. Bands like Guster, Widespread Panic, the String Cheese Incident, and the defunct Phish all mimic the Dead’s dedication to touring and their fans mimic the Dead – fan’s dedication to following them. In each town and show, if you step into the parking lot of these jam band concerts you’ll enter a self contained barter economy. Fans follow the band from town to town for months on ends so they have to find entrepreneurial ways to survive and profit. The parking lot economy is complete with reputation mechanisms, commodity money, and competitive profit seeking. There’s almost no barrier to entry other than the costs of travel, concert tickets and maybe a tie died t-shirt.
3. Gutter Punks, Wanderers, and Couriers
During the depression teens rode the rails as a means to survive. After Vietnam returning soldiers had a difficult time readjusting to domestic life and many rode trains until they felt readjusted to American life. Today we still see teenagers take to the roads and railways squatting in town after town. Many of them build extensive networks of contacts in the cities they visit, and have skill sets like bicycle delivery, tattoo artistry, and music technician skills that lend themselves to producing in a wide variety of locations.
4. Scenesters
Pop music by definition is just what ever happens to be popular at a given time, but has no real reference to the content or style of music. People who seriously collect and investigate music recognize that geographic location is a very critical element in musical style. Jazz, punk, rock, rap etc all have distinctive sounds that refer directly to geographic cities or regions, these influences don’t get incorporated into the way pop music gets portrayed and so we typically don’t spend time thinking about it. But for every group like The Beatles there’s usually an entire scene or movement of bands with similar styles and influences all building off of one another. So what makes a one city a good place to breed a punk scene and another a good place to breed a rap community? Why do we some scenes thrive and other’s fail?
5. Graffiti Artists
Maybe I’m the only one interested in this phenomenon, but to me it seems like an empirical puzzle. Artists invest time, energy, real resources, and high risk to obtain little to no tangible rewards. The bulk of the rewards are doled out in reputations among a very small tight knit group of people. Graffiti artists reward each other with high reputations for skill and risk but other than that what do artists really get out of it other than grief. Some artists go on to transform their reputations into financial profits. Ecko, Stussy and several other urban clothing designers first started out spray painting city walls.
Any more?