Meet the Economist

A profile of the brilliant economist Ronald Fryer;

Fryer’s own life story is a powerful reminder that adverse circumstances aren’t automatically limiting. It begins in a poor neighborhood of Daytona Beach, Florida. His mother left Fryer and his father when Roland was about three years old. Fryer spent many of his childhood summers with other relatives, some of whom ran a crack operation in their home. One afternoon when Fryer was 12, four members of the family were arrested on drug charges. One died in prison; another was murdered not long after being released. By 13, Roland himself was dealing marijuana and carrying a gun. But at 15, after being mistaken by police for a crack dealer and interrogated for hours at the station, he decided it was time for a change. He began to take his studies seriously.

“I did not want to end up like everyone around me: people with extraordinary talent that was never realized,” Fryer said.

After graduating high school, Fryer whizzed through an economics degree from University of Texas at Arlington in two and a half years. He went to graduate school at Penn State University and finished his dissertation, “Mathematical Models of Discrimination and Inequality,” in just three years. Now 29, he has more than a year’s experience on the Harvard tenure track, offices in four different buildings, and a team of 20 undergraduates working for him.

Fryer’s success runs counter to many of his own findings, which are variations on the same theme: where you’re from correlates strongly with where you wind up....

In another paper, Fryer worked with Levitt and University of Chicago colleagues Paul Heaton and Kevin Murphy to build a “crack index” from publicly available statistics such as arrests and emergency room visits. The study found that in the 1980s, the proliferation of crack led to more homicides among young blacks. Then, in the 1990s, crime abated. Was the reason, as some observers have claimed, a decline in crack use? No, concluded Fryer and his colleagues. Instead, they found that the market structure for crack stabilized, with suppliers agreeing to share turf. As a result, violent crime related to the business itself fell

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