The Glenn Show is back! My guest this week is University of Chicago behavioral economist Jens Ludwig, author of the new book, Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence. Jens studies urban gun violence and how to reduce it. His home campus is in Hyde Park, on Chicago’s South Side, where the problem of gun violence is as bad as anywhere in the country. He’s taking on one of the most vexing and consequential questions facing America today, one that’s persisted even as crime rates have fallen. Jens’s work is especially close to my heart, because he’s studying it on my home turf, among other places. He argues that typical responses to the gun violence problem—like getting rid of America’s 400 million guns—simply aren’t workable. Instead, he argues for pragmatic solutions to rehabilitate American cities’ streets and teach deescalation at scale.
Jens tells us about his early encounters with urban poverty while coaching youth soccer, and how solving it has driven him ever since. As John says, when Americans think about urban gun violence, race is usually one of the first factors they consider. But why is that? Jens argues that urban infrastructure may play an under-recognized role in exacerbating the crisis. But, I suggest, isn’t carrying a gun in some of these neighborhoods rational—it seems like almost everyone else has got one. Jens thinks a different kind of rationality is at work, and he calls on Daniel Kahneman’s “fast thinking” to explain why. Finally, Jens argues for a pragmatic vision of intervention and urban rehabilitation, arguing that even if their success is partial, the benefits are worth it.
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0:00 How Jens got interested in American gun violence
2:45 What’s “unexpected” about the origins of gun violence?
5:29 Race and the culture of gun violence
9:30 Ground News ad
11:20 Are high rates of gun violence a cultural issue or an equilibrium?
17:09 Is urban gun violence the result of rational behavior?
24:34 The link between Kahnemanian “fast thinking” and violent conflict
36:46 Are gun violence interruptions scalable?
40:52 The role of urban design in reducing crime and violence
47:31 Jens: Gang-motivated crime may not account for as much violence as its seems
50:43 Rehabilitating “Broken Windows”
53:47 Jens’s “pathological pragmatism”
Recorded June 13, 2025
Links and Readings
Jens’s new book, Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence
Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow
William Julius Williams’s book, Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Social Policy
Jane Jacobs’s book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Melissa Kearney’s book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind
George Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s classic Atlantic article, “Broken Windows”
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