Unforgiving Places
The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence
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- $35.99
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
What if everything we understood about gun violence was wrong?
In 2007, economist Jens Ludwig moved to the South Side of Chicago to research two big questions: Why does gun violence happen, and is there anything we can do about it? Almost two decades later, the answers aren’t what he expected. Unforgiving Places is Ludwig’s revelatory portrait of gun violence in America’s most famously maligned city.
Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic while others don’t, Ludwig shows gun violence to be more circumstantial—and more solvable—than our traditional approaches lead us to believe.
Drawing on decades of research and Ludwig’s immersive fieldwork in Chicago, including “countless hours spent in schools, parks, playgrounds, housing developments, courtrooms, jails, police stations, police cars, and lots and lots of McDonald’ses,” Unforgiving Places is a breakthrough work at the cutting edge of behavioral economics. As Ludwig shows, progress on gun violence doesn’t require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Teaching impulse management skills to at-risk youth could help stem gun violence, according to this stimulating study. Public policy scholar Ludwig (coauthor of Gun Violence) notes that while poverty and segregation contribute to higher rates of gun violence in low-income neighborhoods, those factors alone can't explain why violent crime rates differ by season and between comparably disadvantaged neighborhoods. The missing variable, Ludwig contends, is what behavioral economists call "System 1 thinking"—quick and automatic cognition that occurs subconsciously. He posits that people living in poor areas learn to "fight back hard," developing strong defensive reflexes. Subjected to "zero-tolerance" policies at school and by law enforcement, underprivileged youth also lack the opportunities to learn how to moderate such reflexes before experiencing dire consequences. Examining trends in crime data, Ludwig notes that more gun crimes happen in less populated neighborhoods with fewer "eyes on the street"—the same types of settings where, studies have shown, lack of social deterrence makes System 1 errors more prone to happen. He also points to how programs that teach impulse management to at-risk youth have been shown to reduce arrests for violent crime by 50%. Meticulous and persuasive, this is a thought-provoking look at the deeply intertwined natures of income inequality and violence.
