job? Well, for the same reason that a pretty Wisconsin farm girl moves to Hollywood. For the same reason that a high-school quarterback wakes up at 5 a.m. to lift weights. They all want to succeed in an ex- tremely competitive field in which, if you reach the top, you are paid a fortune (to say nothing of the attendant glory and power).     To the kids growing up in a housing project on Chicagos south side, crack dealing was a glamour profession. For many of them, the job of gang boss-highly visible and highly lucrative-was easily the best job they thought they had access to. Had they grown up under different circumstances, they might have thought about becoming economists or writers. But in the neighborhood where J. T.s gang op- erated, the path to a decent legitimate job was practically invisible. Fifty-six percent of the neighborhoods children lived below the poverty line (compared to a national average of 18 percent). Seventy- eight percent came from single-parent homes. Fewer than 5 percent of the neighborhoods adults had a college degree; barely one in three adult men worked at all. The neighborhoods median income was about $15,000 a year, well less than half the U.S. average. During the years that Venkatesh lived with J. T.s gang, foot soldiers often asked his help in landing what they called "a good job": working as a janitor at the University of Chicago. The problem with crack dealing is the same as in every other glam- our profession: a lot of people are competing for a very few prizes. Earning big money in the crack gang wasnt much more likely than the Wisconsin farm girl becoming a movie star or the high-school quarterback playing in the NFL. But criminals, like everyone else, re- spond to incentives. So if the prize is big enough, they will form a line down the block just hoping for a chance. On the south side of Chi- cago, people wanting to sell crack vastly outnumbered the available street corners.