What is the best advice/feedback you have ever received?

Big D Levitt & Dubner , ,

As I was again reading When to Rob a Bank (if you can’t tell, I’m a big Freakonomist), I came upon a section describing what the best advice Stephen Dubner had received. In the article, Dubner was talking about how his best received advice helped them in life. He recalled a story about fishing, and how he was told to go for the big fish instead of wasting so much time catching small ones, “it’s a lesson in opportunity cost: if you spend all you time catching to little fish, you won’t have time – or develop the technique, or the patience – to ever catch the big ones” (pp. 349-350).

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Let’s Get Right Into It

Big D Levitt & Dubner, School to Prison Pipeline , , ,

I know this is the first post, and instead of explaining what the site is about (you can see the About page for that), I’m going to get right into the deep end.

I was reading the new book that came out just a few days ago by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (yes, the authors of Freakonomics), titled When to Rob a Bank. Believe it or not, the book is not all about robbing banks, but rather a collection of ten years worth of blog posts. One of these posts explain the difference in the prices of prescription drugs. On page 52, Levitt and Dubner explain, “Here are the prices … found at Houston stores for ninety tablets of generic Prozac:

Walgreens: $117

Eckerd: $115

CVS: $115

Sam’s Club: $15

Costco: $12

“Those aren’t typos. Walgreens charges $117 for a bottle of the same pills for which Costco charges $12”.

I bet that not a lot of people know that, as I didn’t until reading it.

So, what does that mean for black folks?

As part of the School to Prison Pipeline, the system often labels African-Americans while they are young kids if they seem to “have” ADHD (that’s one example). Of course, if the same thing was going on with a white boy, they will be portrayed as “just being kids”.

When we get that label, we will be forced to pay prescription drugs, and that will of course cost a whole lot of money, unless you know where to get them.

So, if you have had your child labeled by the system, now you know where to get prescriptions cheaper.

– Black Economist