"The Rise of the Hustler Class in the Post-Industrial Metropolis"

Date: March 31st, 2016
Duration: 1h:17m:27s

The 2016 Spring Presidential Lecture Series
“The Rise of the Hustler Class in the Post-Industrial Metropolis”

Dr. Trevor B. Milion
Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and Criminal Justice at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York

Lecture Summary:
Whether it’s selling bootleg goods, playing the numbers, squatting rent-free, scamming tourists with bogus stories, selling knockoffs on Canal Street, or crafting Ponzi schemes, con artists use verbal persuasion, physical misdirection, and sheer charm to convince others to do what they want. This lecture focuses on both confidence artists (grifters who have mastered the art of deception) and hustlers (street entrepreneurs who have learned the science and art of persuasion).

For those who have ever lived in New York City—or even walked its streets as a tourist—most are familiar with the presence of the “hustler class” in the post-industrial city. New Yorkers make the proximity to hustlers a part of their daily commute: whether buying bottled water at a traffic light, a pirated DVD while seated in a restaurant, or an out-of-print magazine while strolling down a sidewalk.

Con artists—those who look to trick unsuspecting marks out of their money—rehearse their talk and use it with great skill to direct the action, particularly when luring an unwitting “street citizen” who becomes a mark or victim. The con game has many of the same elements as a play: props, a stage, a director, actors and audience, a plot, and finally curtains. The game seduces an ordinary citizen into a staged situation played out on the street. The con game, like a good play, must have certain features if it is to be successful: believability, universality, reflection of the human condition, and a fluid, seductive quality that ensnares the audience.

The city plays a vital role in the rise of con artists and hustlers. As New York City has transitioned to a services economy over the past four decades, many have been left out of the American Dream and have leaned on New York’s informal economy to survive. New York’s system of laws creates professional “freeloaders” who take advantage of tenant laws; New York’s cosmopolitan and designer thirst create hustlers that hawk knockoff goods on Canal Street; and the city’s infrastructure creates opportunities for young hustlers that sell bottled water at succinctly timed traffic lights on a hot summer’s day. Con artists and hustlers are ultimately people and products of their environments, products of their respective generational values, and important players in a bustling city jam-packed with potential marks and customers.

Dr. Trevor B. Milton, has worked with at-risk populations for more than eighteen years. Shortly after attaining his Bachelor of Arts in 1998, he worked with court-involved adolescents in Boston, Massachusetts—and later in New York City—as a case manager, youth counselor, and court advocate. Trevor Milton became interested in research on alternative-to-incarceration programs for youth while earning his Master of Arts in Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School in 2007.

Trevor B. Milton is an Assistant Professor of sociology and criminal justice at Queensborough Community College, CUNY. His areas of research include prison reform, adolescent criminal behavior, informal economic practices, urban ethnography, alternative-to-incarceration programs, and the intersectionality of class and racial identity. He is the author of Overcoming the Magnetism of Street Life: Crime-Engaged Youth and the Programs That Transform Them (Lexington Books, 2011), “Class Status and the Construction of Black Masculinity” featured in Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World: A Review Journal (Spring 2012), and co-author of The Con Men: Hustling in New York City (Columbia University Press, 2015).