Chicago Economist Argues for Social Intervention on Gun Violence
Ludwig claims that neighborhoods most affected by shootings must increase their “eyes on the street” — people who can step in and interrupt arguments before they escalate to gunfire — to create safer environments. Ludwig’s analysis of randomized experiments, like Philadelphia turning vacant lots into small parks, and New York City adding more street lighting, showed that cities have had success when they improve their environments enough to cause more people to spend time outside their homes. He said that placing specific people, like police or violence interrupters, in the areas that need the most help can add an extra layer of informal social control. Ludwig says his findings support some of the gun violence interruption work already happening, like Chicago’s “Light in the Night” events.
“Behavioral economics gives us a way to understand why all of those insanely smart, clever, resourceful practitioners have been right,” he said. “I’ve gone through data and tested the solutions that practitioners have come up with.”
In a city where debates about gun violence often focus on large-scale solutions that take years to implement, survivors of gun violence say they need solutions now — and Ludwig’s proposal offers a short-term alternative at a time when leaders in major cities like Chicago are worried that funding for gun violence prevention could be constrained. These proposed fixes at the front end, Ludwig said, can also help make broader long-term solutions more effective and achievable.
“Conventional wisdom implies that the motivation for gun violence is super persistent, and that violence interrupted is merely violence delayed,” he said. “In contrast, the behavioral economics perspective says that the motivation for gun violence is fleeting, and so if you have someone interrupt gun violence, violence interrupted is violence prevented.”
I spoke with Ludwig about his new book and how his proposed framework provides a pathway for city leaders to reduce gun violence now.
These answers have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
RO: Why is it important to break down the common ideas behind why gun violence happens — and how it has been tackled in the past — before proposing a new approach?
It makes you see that the conventional wisdom of both the left and the right have a shared assumption that before anyone pulls a trigger, they’re engaging in premeditated, deliberate decision making, weighing the benefits and costs.
If you look at the news and you look at entertainment, what disproportionately gets covered there are gang wars over drug-selling turf or people shot as part of robberies. But that turns out to be like a very skewed picture of what gun violence in America actually is.
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“Most shootings don’t get covered on the news — they’re arguments that go sideways and end in a tragedy because someone’s got a gun.”
— Jens Ludwig, University of Chicago behavioral economist
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Most shootings in America are not motivated by economic considerations; they’re not premeditated. Most shootings don’t get covered on the news — they’re arguments that go sideways and end in a tragedy because someone’s got a gun.
Your book states: “Criminal behavior, even gun violence, is just human behavior.” Why is it important to debunk the idea that “bad people” do “bad things”?
If you think that the people who are pulling triggers and committing gun violence are fundamentally different from the rest of us, then that’s just a small step to thinking that the only solution is to lock “those people” away.
That has been a big part of the motivation for our public policies over the last 50 years. We’ve massively ramped up the incarceration rate in America, partly in the belief that people who commit crime are incorrigible. That has reduced crime and violence to a degree, but at an enormous cost.
You address that cost in this sentence that stayed with me: “Shootings account for fewer than 1 percent of all crimes but nearly 70 percent of the total social harm of crime.” Can you break down what that means and how you arrived at that conclusion?
Economists have come up with different ways of measuring the harms from different social problems.
I’ve lived in cities for the last 30 years, first Washington, D.C., and then Chicago, and so I’ve been the victim of a bunch of different crimes. I had my wife’s bike stolen. We’ve had our car broken into. More recently, I was held up at gunpoint going to pick up my youngest daughter from her piano lesson. It was not anything to do with the value of what they stole. It was all about the deeply petrifying realization that I was one trigger pull away from that robbery being a murder, and we were five minutes away from my daughter walking out into the middle of it. I was enormously traumatized.
Gun crime is so different from every other type of crime, not only in how traumatizing it is to the victim, but the fact that the victims aren’t the only victims. Gun violence distorts when and where people are willing to live their lives, with tremendous harm to cities. My University of Chicago colleague, Steve Levitt, did a study where he found that every murder that happens in a city reduces the city’s population on net by 70 people. That’s more people moving out, fewer people moving in.
In the approach of tackling gun violence by fixing social problems — racism, poverty, etc. — you mention that while this could be a solution, we are nowhere close to resolving these issues. Why then, is it important to propose short-term solutions?
A lot of the policy attention from the left and center world has focused on the causal arrow between poverty causing gun violence. What is much less appreciated is the causal arrow going in the other direction that gun violence also causes and contributes to poverty.
In the City of Chicago, it is enormously difficult to do community economic development in a neighborhood where there is uncontrolled gun violence. Chicago subsidized Whole Foods to open a store in Englewood. Whole Foods wound up shutting down that store, further contributing to the food desert problem in Englewood. One of the challenges there was people from surrounding neighborhoods were worried about driving into Englewood to go shopping because of the gun violence.
Gun violence drives people and businesses out, which leads to further gun violence, which leads to more people and businesses leaving. If you control gun violence, that makes it easier to retain and attract both people and businesses — that strengthens a community.
It’s like a stepping stone. If we can reduce gun violence a bit, then these other measures that haven’t been successful in the past may have a better chance.
Exactly. It makes all of these other root-cause policies so much more likely to succeed.
You suggest that gun violence happens because of heated arguments. You propose that the solution is improving the environments in which these conflicts occur. Can you break down what this idea entails and what more “eyes on the street” would look like in practice?
Sixty years ago, Jane Jacobs, the famous urban planner, wrote a wonderful book called “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” She argued that similarly poor neighborhoods vary enormously in the rate of crime and gun violence. She attributed that to the presence, or absence, in different neighborhoods, of people around who are willing to step in and de-escalate something before it turns violent.
There’s randomized experiments now that show that you can double the amount of crime prevention that you get from your spending on police and violence intervention by using data to put them in the times and places where conflict is most likely to occur.
We can’t have people on literally every street corner. We need to use the data to tell us when and where conflict is most likely, so we can prioritize those places for “eyes on the street.”
Throughout the book, you share an equation: gun violence = guns + violence. You state we can’t just focus on gun control but also need to address violence on its own. Why is it important to “diversify the portfolio” of how advocates tackle gun violence, beyond gun reform, beyond solutions that have been proposed in the past?
Given the importance of the problem, it seems like we would not want to put all of our eggs into the gun control basket. The problem is so important that we should be pushing on every margin possible.
If gun availability is something that we as a country can’t do very much about in the near term, the good news is that there’s another angle to this that we can work on in the meantime, that the data suggests can be enormously helpful, which is reducing the willingness of people to use guns to hurt one another.
Young people and their use of guns is also mentioned throughout your book. How does a deeper dive into this group help support your argument?
The fact that gun violence is so disproportionately concentrated among young people makes the tragedy all that much worse, in terms of the amount of human potential that is lost.
As people get older, their economic concerns tend to grow. That would lead you to think that gun violence should be worse among older people. If gun violence is due to economic desperation, and if you think that someone’s character is incorrigibly good or bad, then you wouldn’t expect to see huge changes in someone’s propensity toward gun violence as they age. In contrast, the behavioral economics perspective gives you a way to understand why people are less likely to engage in gun violence as we age, because most of us, as we get older, we get wiser.
Chicagoans that I’ve spoken to think about gun violence in a holistic way. They think there should be gun reform, people causing harm should be punished, more resources should be available, and intervention has to be done. What are some takeaways from your conversations with Chicagoans, and how did they inform your argument?
The public conversation has misunderstood the problem of gun violence, but the front-line practitioners who are working on the problem, they have long understood the nature of the problem themselves, and they’ve designed a bunch of very clever solutions.
Becoming a Man is a program that shouldn’t work under conventional wisdom. It doesn’t threaten people with longer prison sentences. It doesn’t end poverty. It helps people better navigate conflict so it doesn’t end in tragedy. [Becoming a Man is a group counseling program in Chicago that teaches teens skills like impulse control and emotional self-regulation.]
What are you hoping will happen next after presenting this argument in your book, either in Chicago or nationwide?
I hope that every mayor reads this book, and residents in every city read this book and press their mayor to act on this very pragmatic set of things that cities can do, even in a world in which they don’t have any money, to make potentially massive changes in this uniquely American problem.
Rita Oceguera is a reporter at The Trace. This article is published courtesy of The Trace.
