Biography: Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research working group on the economics of crime, and Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. He helped found the Crime Lab 16 years ago to serve as a sort of R&D partner to the public sector to help address major social problems like gun violence, and has led to nationwide efforts to change policing, community violence intervention, and social programs for youth violence prevention, as well as new data-driven decision tools in use across the entire New York City court system. This work has been published in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals and featured in national news outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR and PBS News Hour. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and serves on the  National Academy of Science’s Committee on Law and Justice.

Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence

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.