Unforgiving places the unexpected origins of American gun violence

"What if everything we knew about gun violence was wrong? In 2007, economist Jens Ludwig moved to the South Side of Chicago in the hope of answering a big question: why do US cities have so much gun violence, and is there anything to be done about it? Almost two decades later, his answers are nothing he ever expected. UNFORGIVING PLACES is the sweeping account of a multi-decade mission to identify the real drivers of violent crime in the American City. Ludwig's data show that America's stock explanations for its violent-crime problem-factors like guns, gangs, race, poverty, the economy, and premeditated malice-fall dramatically short in explaining the actual incidence and scale of the country's violent crime. Instead, Ludwig shows that the incidence of violent crime can be traced to something far more innocuous: to momentary disagreements that escalate differently based on the very different environments that characterize contemporary American society today. By framing American gun violence as a situational response to different kinds of stress in different kinds of places, Ludwig presents this longstanding problem in starkly solvable terms. Progress on gun violence needn't require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene on the ten-minute windows when behaviors predictably go haywire. Blending the original work of a renowned social scientist with first-person dispatches from a largely caricaturized place, UNFORGIVING PLACES is a book of uncharacteristic rigor and humanity. Ludwig expands our understanding of what economics can teach us-and in the process, redefines this quintessentially American challenge"--