Think Better with Jens Ludwig

- [George Wu] I am George Wu. I am the John P. and Lillian A Gould professor of Behavioral Science here at Booth. I wanna say a little bit about Think Better. So some of you have been here before. We have a public lecture series. It's hosted by the Roman Family Center for Decision Research, which I'll talk about in a second. But the purpose of this series is to explore how insights from behavioral science affect policy, affect society, shape policy, impact business, and improve the lives of all of you. The Think Better series is just one of many activities that the Roman Family Center for Decision Research pursues in support of the behavioral sciences. In addition to this, these are scripted words, so I'm saying it, in addition to our terrific faculty. Our center also supports many young scholars and postdocs in the field, runs workshops and Brownbag series. The Center is also the home of our PIMCO Decision Research laboratories, which conducts groundbreaking behavioral science research at Mindworks, Our campus in Hyde Park and online in the virtual labs and throughout the city in our popup labs. So you may get an invitation to participate in one study. If you haven't been, I invite you to go to Mindworks, which is 300 or so, South Michigan, [Note: The correct address is 224 South Michigan Avenue.]

It's the world's first discovery center and behavioral science lab located in the Chicago Loop. It's fun. It's an opportunity to participate in behavioral science research and there are fun prizes and all kinds of other stuff. So finally, both Mindworks and our Think Better series help increase the visibility of the work of behavioral scientists. Our discipline offers insights into some of humanity's most vexing problems, which I will get to in a second. And we are honored to have an ever-growing audience with whom we can share our work. So now let me introduce our guests. So Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago, and the Pritzker director of the University of Chicago's Crime Lab. Through his research, Jens uses the tools of data science to assist policy makers with reducing the burdens of gun violence and mitigating the harms of the criminal justice system. For those of you who don't know about the crime lab, the crime lab explores ways to deploy social programs to enact meaningful change, not just in Chicago, but across the nation. His work has been featured in all kinds of news outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. He's been widely published in the top economic journals, including American Economic Review and Quarterly Journal of Economics. And he will be talking about his forthcoming book. Let's see, "Unforgiving Places." It will be coming out in April. So let's welcome Jens.

- [Jens Ludwig] Great, thanks so much George and the Center for Decision Research for having me. Thanks everybody for coming. What an amazing crowd. It looks like an Elon Musk rally. Too soon? So what I wanted to start off doing is just telling you a little bit about why I wrote the book and why I do this sort of work more generally. So I was on the faculty of Georgetown for many years before moving to the University of Chicago in the fall of 2007 when a doctoral student in chemistry named Amadou Cisse from Senegal defended his dissertation and two weeks later was shot and killed a block off campus, about a block from my office at the Harris School on the south side of the midway. This led to a lot of soul searching at the university. We like to say we've won more Nobel Prizes than any other university in the world, and yet here we're literally not having impact in our own backyard.

So what can we do to be more helpful? The National Academy of Sciences had just come out with a 500 page Blue Ribbon Commission report summarizing everything that we knew from all of the scientific evidence about how to prevent gun violence in America. And the conclusion was nothing. We don't really have any idea about what to do to be helpful on this problem. And so we said a bunch of us, Roseanna Ander, Harold Pollack, myself, we said, you know, this is the sort of thing that a great research university like the University of Chicago should be working on, is how do we actually reduce gun violence out in the real world? And so then we started the crime lab and we've done a lot of work with the city of Chica. Our theory of change has always been the 800 pound gorilla in this space is the government. The city of Chicago spends $20 billion a year. The state spends 50 to a hundred billion if you count federal pass-throughs. The federal government spells spends trillions and trillions. If we can be sort of an R&D partner and help them use their money more effectively, that's the way to get real leverage and make the world better at very large scale. So this is really summarizing the lessons that the crime lab team collectively has learned since 2007. I'm just the pretty face that gets to tell you the, I don't know why some of you are laughing about that. And I did also wanna call out two of my co-authors in particular who used to be at the University of Chicago, Sendhil Mullainathan now at MIT and Anuj at Princeton. I like to refer to them now as my safety school co-authors. If you can't make that joke at the Gleacher Center, I don't know where you can make it. So, oh, a pause. Thank you. Probably not a Princeton alum who's clapping back there. So let's talk a little bit about the problem that has that has brought us here. So this is a problem that is unique, unique to America among rich countries in the world. So I wanna show you murder rates per hundred thousand people for a bunch of advanced countries. And so this is the United States is the bar to your left there and you can see that we are off. This is murder rates per capita per hundred thousand people more specifically. And you can see that the United States is completely off the charts compared to any other country in our socioeconomic category. And what's striking about this for me is like, look at the gar, look at the bar for Turkey. Nobody looks at Turkey and thinks that is a model of good governance. And yet people in Turkey are looking at the United States. They think, what the fuck is going on in America? Really, like people around the world cannot make sense of this gun violence problem, right? It is. We see it every day. So it has become normalized, but this is not what you see in any other country around the world. The next thing that I wanna show you is I wanna break down the murder rate per capita in the murders committed with guns versus committed through some means other than firearms. And what you can see when I do that is that the overwhelming amount of American exceptionalism here is due to our greatly elevated rate of murders with guns. Okay? So that is the thing that makes the United States so different, is gun murders. You know, another way to think about the problem here is when you look at the crimes that the police in America, in American cities become aware of, eight outta out of every 10 are property crimes. Most of the rest are violent crimes like robberies, sexual assaults, aggravated assaults, things like that. .2%, .2% of every crime in the United States is a murder. You've just seen most of those are committed with guns. But in economics we've developed a bunch of methods starting in environmental economics to measure the social burden of different problems. And when you look at, when I read you this graph now not looking at the frequency of different crimes, but the social harm, you can see that the 0.2% of all crimes that are murders account for something like 70% of the social harm from crime. So from the perspective of the American public, gun violence is the crime problem. And I can tell you I was robbed at gunpoint five years ago picking my oldest daughter up from her piano lesson in Kenwood. And it is a life-changing experience. This graph makes a ton of sense to me about why everybody is petrified about this part of the crime problem in particular. Okay, so why is this going on? Why do we have this problem? I think, what I wanna argue in the book is we've been framing the problem incorrectly. This, by the way, this is as good as economics humor gets. So if you don't like this, it's not gonna get any funnier as we go over the rest of the, this is supposed to be, how we've framed the problem. So I think we frame the problem incorrectly. That's the bad news in a backward looking sense. But the good news is I think if we take a different frame on the problem, it's much more solvable than we've thought. Okay, so how have we been thinking about the problem historically? I think part of the problem is that we've been sort of looking to the wrong University of Chicago economists for inspiration. So when we think about gun violence, we've been thinking too much about the problem like this guy, as all of you know, is Milton Friedman, or this guy, as all of you know is Gary Becker and not enough thinking about the problem like this guy. I can't actually remember who that is now. He looks kind of grumpy, I think.

He does look a little bit grumpy in that picture. Maybe George can remind us later who, that's Richard Thaler, of course, Nobel laureate, inventor of behavioral economics. So that's what I think is sort of the key breakthrough. Okay. So that's gonna be what I'm gonna argue with the next couple minutes and hopefully you'll be persuaded and we'll have plenty of time for Q & A at the end. All right, so how have we been thinking about the gun violence problem historically? You know, I think the obvious place to start is if you go back to this graph and you look at the United States and the graph right next to it of the United Kingdom, you immediately think isn't this, this is gonna be a super short talk because I know exactly what the problem is. It's gun laws, right? The UK has much strict stricter gun laws. They have almost no gun murders. The United States has much looser gun laws. We have something like 400 million guns in a country of 330 million people QED. Okay? And what I wanna argue is that, yes, the data is consistent with gun prevalence being super important, but that's an incomplete explanation. And to help you see that that explanation is in, the fact that it's incomplete turns out to be good news, just to sort of preview, right? The fact that it's incomplete turns out to be good news. And to help you see that it's incomplete, I wanna tell you a very quick story about this place, which maybe I don't need, forgive me for telling. Most of you probably are already aware that this is, of course, easy tree recycling on the south side of Chicago whose slogan is a tree is a terrible thing to waste. The interesting thing about E-Z Tree Recycling is where it's located. So it's located at the intersection of 71st and and Dorchester Avenue, right next to Hyde Park Animal Hospital where I took our dog Trixie when she had cancer many years ago, right next to Oakwood Cemetery, where Gary Becker and Enrico Fermi are buried, but most importantly for present purposes, at Dorchester and 71st, that is the dividing line between two Chicago neighborhoods, Greater Grand Crossing to the west and South Shore to the east. So why is that so important, right? Why is that so important? You look at these two neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago, literally right across Dorchester Avenue, and you look at the rate of shootings per capita and you can see year over year on a per capita basis shootings are about twice as common in Greater Grand Crossing as they are in South Shore. Okay? Now let's just reflect on this now. So what causes gun violence? US versus UK? You think the story is as simple as it, it's just all about gun laws and gun prevalence, and yet, you look at Greater Grand Crossing in South Shore, the gun laws are exactly the same on the west side of Dorchester Avenue as on the East. It can't be just as simple as gun laws. As important as gun regulation is, if anybody in the room has a button that they could push to get rid of the 400 million guns in the United States, if you push that, you would make the country much safer, I wanna be very clear, but I think if we're all reading the same newspaper headlines correctly, the country as a whole is unlikely to be pushing that button anytime soon for better or for worse. Okay? So gun laws are important, but they're clearly not the entire story because you can see, all right. So if you think about gun violence as being guns combined with the willingness of people to use guns to harm other people, it is gun violence is guns plus violence. If gun control is the same in Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore, and if gun violence is so dramatically different across these two neighborhoods, then it's gotta be the case that violence is also independently sort of turning the dial, holding gun prevalence constant, right? So that then becomes the other sort of margin that we have to start thinking about if we wanna make progress immediately without having to wait for big changes in gun laws. Okay? So then you're sort of asking yourself, okay, well then what is driving violent behavior? The willingness of people to use guns to hurt other people. So I know what all of you are thinking on this question, partly 'cause I have a collaborator at Cornell. We've got this amazing research program on ESP. So I know ESP is real people, but I've also cheated and looked at the survey data. I know what Americans think about violent behavior. When you ask Americans, almost all of you will fall if you follow the patterns in the national data, almost all of you will fall into one or two camps. What causes gun violence? A bunch of you will think the problem is character logically bad people who aren't afraid of the criminal justice system and the penalties that will be imposed on them if they use guns to hurt other people. Okay? And in that sort of perspective, the only solution will be bigger sticks, right? More people in prison, longer prison terms. That's dominated our public policy for many years. And the rest of you, the rest of you will be thinking that's not the explanation. It's clearly economically desperate people who are doing whatever they need to do to survive, right? So basically bad people, bad economic conditions, those are, most people think one of those two is the explanation for violence and gun violence in the US. Okay. So now let's return with that as the conventional wisdom about violent behavior. Let's return to Greater Grand Crossing in South Shore then. Okay, so what do we know about the criminal justice system? Well, both Greater Grand Crossing in South Shore are in Chicago, located in Cook County, located in Illinois. They're served by the same police department, by the same court system, by the same Department of Corrections, criminal justice system to a first approximation is the same across both neighborhoods. What about poverty rates? It turns out that poverty rates in both neighborhoods are almost identical as well. And if you spend much time on the South Side, you will also know that the level of racial segregation is almost identical in Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore as well. All right, so problem number one with the conventional wisdom as an explanation for gun violence, is it doesn't really explain very much, right? It explains surprisingly little of this problem that like when you look at the most recent mayoral election in Chicago, you're not surprised that crime and gun violence was the number one concern of Chicago voters. But all the pollsters were saying the gap between crime is number one and the number two problem is the largest they've ever seen in polling history in Chicago. So this is the most important problem for everybody living in Chicago and lots of other cities around the country. And yet here we are. We really don't have any way to understand why the gun violence rates are different across these neighborhoods. So not great that it doesn't have much explanatory power and also not great that we've been stuck on this conventional wisdom for a long time. So these two quotes that I showed you before, one of them turns out to be from the GOP presidential platform in 1932. And the other is a quote from Franklin Roosevelt when he was president back in 1939. We have been having the same arguments over and over and over again for a hundred years. Okay. We are stuck in a rut. How has this been going? I don't need to tell all of you in this room that we, our global dominance in many, many areas is being threatened, but not in incarceration. We've got that locked up. As everybody in this room knows, oh, sorry, I didn't even think about the. I'm too tired to intentionally make puns. So if it comes out, I, no pun intended. As everybody in this room also knows, there are huge racial disparities in incarceration in the United States as well, right? And if that was keeping us safe, maybe we could have a conversation about whether it's worth it or whatever. But when you look at the time series of murder rates in the United States, you can see that the murder rate today is almost exactly what it was like in 1950. And if I extended the graph back to 1900, it would be almost exactly the same as in 1900 as well. So yes, it has some ups and downs over time, but to a first approximation, we have made no long-term progress on this problem for 125 years. Not great, not great, okay. And let me just, the sort of the icing on the cake for this as well, okay? Is I wanna show you a graph. So one thing that a lot of people in Chi, or some people in Chicago like to say is, well, the gun violence problem at least isn't as bad as it was in the early 1990s at the peak of the crack cocaine epidemic. For those of you who are long time Chicago residents. And you can see in this graph, let's see if I can, I'm afraid to use the laser pointer. Well, yeah, no. If you look at the green line on the bottom there, that's the murder rate per capita for white residents in Chicago. Definitely true if you're white in Chicago, the city's become safer. The line right above that is the murder rate per capita for Hispanics in Chicago. You can see the city, to a lesser extent, has become safer for Hispanic residents. The top line is the murder rate per capita for Black residents in Chicago, okay? We spend, for totally understandable reasons, a ton of time talking about and worrying about inequality in income and wealth and housing access and on and on and on, all of which is super important. We don't spend nearly enough time talking about something that is at least as as important in people's day-to-day lives, which is something even more basic of public safety. And we are seeing in graphs like this huge fanning out of inequality in public safety that is getting absolutely no discussion in the public conversation, which I think is a huge, huge problem. Okay. So I hope to have made you depressed by now. I hope to have made you depressed by now. The good news is I think there's a way to sort of think ourselves out of this problem. Okay, so if you think about the conventional wisdom, why do people use guns to harm one another, right? You go back to this conventional wisdom. Notice that there's something that the left and the right in their perspective on this problem weirdly have in common. Okay? You know, the people on the left are like, we just need bigger sticks. The implicit assumption there is like, before anyone pulls a trigger, they're actually thinking about what they're doing. And if we could just change the incentives to them by waving a bigger stick in front of them, they'd change their behavior. And the people on the left are like, well, if we could just offer people more lucrative carrots that would entice them away from criminal behavior. The assumption is there also, you know, in that sort of view of the problem, people again are doing some sort of Gary Becker benefit cost calculation in their head before they pull a trigger. So like gun violence as intentional deliberate behavior. Let me show you what gun violence actually looks like. So this is a more or less randomly selected example from the Chicago Tribune. June 2nd, this happened a couple miles. This is in South Shore at the intersection of 73rd in Coles Avenue, a couple miles from my office at the Harris School on campus in Hyde Park. It's a Saturday. Three in the afternoon. Two groups of kids are arguing with one another out in the middle of the street, crowded street, bunch of kids, about whether someone in one of the groups had stolen a used bike from somebody in the other group. Okay? When a 16-year-old in one of the groups pulls out a Glock semi-automatic handgun from their waistband, aims into the other group, pulls the trigger, hits a 17-year-old kid in the chest, gets raced down Lake Shore drive, pronounced dead at the Northwestern Emergency Department, which I think is just a couple blocks from where we are right here, okay? That is what most gun violence in America actually looks like. It is not premeditated. It is not motivated by economic motivations. These are garden variety arguments that end in tragedy because someone's got a gun there. And you can see this in the actually like, so let's just, let's just go back to thinking about what that kid must have been thinking, right? Imagine that you were going to look at this through the eyes of like, people must be doing some sort of Gary Becker benefit-cost calculation, right? What is the benefit here? If you look at Facebook, a used bike on the South Side of Chicago, if you get 50 bucks for it, you're lucky. Even in a city like Chicago with our criminal justice systems deficiency, you shoot someone at three in the afternoon on a crowded street, you've got at least a 50/50 chance of getting arrested and convicted. In fact, the shooter is spending the rest of his natural life downstate in the Illinois Department of Corrections. Okay. So $50 bike traded off against a 50% chance of spending the rest of your time, your life in prison. Who in their right mind would rationally be willing to flip that coin? It just makes no sense from the conventional wisdom perspective of the problem. Okay, and you can see in the data the overwhelming majority of shootings in Chicago, and not just in Chicago. I've spent a bunch of time looking at data from cities all across the country. This is what the national data tell us as well. The overwhelming majority of gun violence is driven by altercations. Okay, so to make progress on this problem, now we need to understand, so what, what is happening in these altercations? Is there any sort of predictable structure to these altercations that we can then use to figure out how to prevent them? Okay? And so what I wanna do to show you sort of a different perspective of what is going on that's leading people to pull triggers, I wanna try and do an audience participation exercise with you guys. We'll see how this actually, if maybe you're all still frozen and this won't work, we'll see. So here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna show you an object, a colored object in the middle of a slide, and I want you to call out the color of the object. So let's do a little practice run for starters, okay?

- [Audience] Black.

- [Jens Ludwig] Oh, that was pathetic. That was pathetic, come on. This is the University of Chicago. We're the University of ideas. You guys came out in the freezing cold. This is only gonna work if everybody's really engaged. Let's go. We're gonna, I'm gonna go really quickly. It's only gonna work if people are really reading this. Okay, here we go.

- [Audience] Black, red, green., blue.

- [Jens Ludwig] Okay. So what was that about? So first, this was an open admission event. So CDR asked me to do a reading test for starters, many of you passed, that's the good news. If you've taken a psychology class at any point, you will recognize this as the Stroop test. So this is the most wide, one of the most widely used tests in psychology. So what is the Stroop test illustrating? Well, if you've read the wonderful book by Daniel Kahneman called "Thinking Fast and Slow," you will, here's what this Stroop test is illustrating. You will know from that book that your mind actually engages in two types of cognition, not just one. Even if you're just aware of only one of those two types of cognition, right? So the type of cognition that we're all aware of is a little voice in our head that's deliberate, that's rational, that's slow. It solves problems. It does benefit cost sort of calculation. And it's very, very mentally effortful. It is so mentally effortful that our minds are designed to do as little of that as possible. And what we're doing most of the time instead, is relying on a series of automatic responses that we have developed to be adaptive to situations, to routine low stake situations, that we see over and over again in daily life. Okay? And all of that happens, it's so low effort, it all happens so quickly. So low effort. Below the level of consciousness. We're not even aware of that, right? So what is the Stroop test illustrating? Here's a low stakes routine situation that we see over and over again. You see some text. When you see a newspaper headline, an CNN scrawl, whatever, you don't consciously ask yourself, oh, should I read that? You just read it even without thinking. That is system one at work, right? Daily prompt, you see text, you just automatically read it, you don't even, it's involuntary, right? And what the Stroop test illustrates is that automatic response that normally works so well for you, can lead to trouble when it's over generalized. So what the Stroop test is doing is it is showing you, that thing that works normally over here, can cause trouble when it's over generalized. It works well usually, but not always, okay? So how does that relate to gun violence? Well, one of the things that we unfortunately know about gun violence in the south and west sides of Chicago and Baltimore and St. Louis and Detroit and Oakland and so many cities around the country is, in under-resourced neighborhoods, kids learn very quickly that they're basically on their own to navigate daily life. So you quickly learn that the adults in your neighborhood are overwhelmed and you are basically on your own. So many years ago I went through a period where I would go out once every couple weeks with a Chicago police department on the South Side. One night, like a Friday night, I'm in Englewood with the commander of the Englewood District and we're on 63rd Street, which is the main sort of commercial drag in Englewood. It's the commander in his white shirt and me next to him. And there's a, it's two lanes both ways. And there's a car in front of us swerving all the way to the left across four lanes, all the way to the right, all the way back again. And then the commander slams on the brakes and puts a bunch of distance between us and the other car. And I turned to him and I said, "Commander, I think that guy's drunk." And he turned to me and he said, "Jens, I do too." And I said, "You're the police, aren't you gonna do something?" And he said, "Jens, if I stopped every drunk driver in Englewood on a Friday night in the summer, that's all I would do. I wouldn't have any time to worry about the thing that we're most worried about here, which is the shootings." And it's true, you go to Englewood on a Friday night in the summer and like it is literally every 15 minutes man with a gun or shots fired calls over and over and over, right? So kids in neighborhoods like that where the adults that normally provide social control in a neighborhood, they're overwhelmed. The kids learn, I'm walking to school, someone challenges me for my lunch money. If I hand over my lunch money today, I've just let it be known that I'm an easy victim. Tomorrow someone's coming to take my coat. The day after that they're taking my phone. So kids very quickly learn their system one's, become conditioned. When I get challenged, I push back. And the severity of that pushback need not be proportional in any way to the severity of the provocation, because it is not retaliation for what you just did. It is forward looking signaling to everyone in the neighborhood that I'm not an easy victim, okay? So daily life get challenged, push back hard. That normally unfortunately works well for kids in these neighborhoods, but can lead to tragedy when someone's got a gun. Okay? And that is the behavioral economics, behavioral science sort of perspective on gun violence that I wanna try and convince you has something to it. Just as a interesting sort of side note, I read in some behavioral science book that the CIA in the height of the Cold War would use this group test to screen out job applicants to make sure they weren't Russian spies. The very last slide in the deck would be this, which my Russian friends tell me is the Russian word for blue. So who else would say orange other than a native Russian speaker? You know, I think this perspective on the gun violence problem, it's not bad people. It's not just bad economic conditions and economic desperation. It's normal people making bad decisions in very difficult circumstances. I was inside the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center on the west side of Chicago a few years ago, and a staff leader there said, "You know, 20% of the kids in here, they're dangerous. You let them out, they're gonna hurt people. The other 80%, I always tell 'em, if I could give you back just 10 minutes of your lives, none of you would be here." Very, very different sort of reframing of the problem, okay? So how do we know that that's true and what do we do about it? Okay, how do we know that's true and what do we do about it? So I wanna just very quickly talk you through the very first randomized experiment that we did at the crime lab was a study of this youth guidance. Youth Guidance is a nonprofit here in Chicago. They've got a program called Becoming a Man. So here's the way that this first fist exercise works. So they get a 12 kids middle school, high school age on the South and West sides of Chicago. They get out of an academic class once a week. They go to a room, they get paired up. So George and I would be a pair, they'd give George a rubber ball. They would say, okay, Jens, you've got 30 seconds to get the ball out of George's hand. The only rule is there are no rules. So what do I do for 30 seconds? I basically beat the crap out of George. I try and pry open his hand, I break his pinky, that doesn't work. I get him in a headlock that doesn't work. I punch him a couple times in the stomach, that doesn't work. I start gnawing on his ear. The counselor says, "All right, all right, that's time." They give me the the rubber ball. George does the same thing to me. The counselor then brings us together to debrief. And the first thing the counselor then says is, so Jens, what strategy did you use to get the ball from George? And most of the kids will say, you know, well I started off trying to pry his hand open. He's stronger than he looks. I broke his pinky. That didn't work. Then I started to put him in a headlock and punch him. And then you called time. And then the program counselor will ask, me, the kid in this circumstance, why didn't you ask for the ball? So youth guidance has done this now with, I think, you know, since we started work with them back in 2010, 2011, with something like 10,000 kids all over Chicago. And what Youth Guidance tells me is that literally not more than a handful of kids ever ask. Okay, so then when the program counselor says, why didn't you ask? The kid will say, well, if I would've asked, George would've thought I was a, and you can imagine what the kids say, right? So that's aha moment number one. Holding a mirror up to a kid to realize that they've misdiagnosed the situation and then the final kicker is the counselor will turn to George and say George, what would you have done if Jens had asked for the ball? And George said, I'd be more than happy to give it to you. Way better than having my finger broken and being punched and having this creepy guy nibble on my ear or whatever it is, right? Okay, so what is that doing? It is putting a kid in a situation where they're being challenged. It is eliciting their automatic response. It is showing them, here's an out of the ordinary situation where your normal response is maladaptive. And it is giving them feedback in a very clever show not tell way that this situation is not what you assumed, right? Now, this is the University of Chicago. This is a very skeptical sort of audience. I know what most of you are thinking. You're thinking all you've done so far is just tell me a story. And you're right. And you're right. So what I wanna do is I wanna tell you about the results of the first research study that we did. So we worked with the Chicago Public Schools and Youth Guidance to enroll something like 2,700 kids, seventh to 10th grade on the South and West sides of Chicago. We raised as much money as we could to serve as many kids as we could. We didn't have enough money to serve all 330,000 kids in the Chicago public school system. So we basically flipped the coin. Some kids got becoming a man, some kids didn't. We use Chicago Police Department data to look at what happened to them after program participation. And when you do that, you see that their violent crime arrest rate goes down by 45%. Most of the kids participated in this program somewhere between like 12 and 15 hours. These are not intrinsically bad kids. If you can basically talk to them for 12 to 15 hours and cut their violence involvement risk in half, and notice what Becoming a Man also did not do is wave a wand and end poverty in disadvantaged in Chicago. As much as we would all wish to do that. As much as we would all wish to do that, that's not what Becoming a Man did. Quote, all it did was reduce violence involvement by 45%. Now I'm an economist, I'm like, this makes no sense. It's not changing incentives. So we raised a bunch of additional money and redid it and we found a 50% reduction a few years later in a follow-up RCT. Okay? Now there's a question about whether you can scale this without compromising fidelity, but now we can see, like as a proof of concept, these results make no sense under conventional wisdom. They only make sense if there is something to the behavioral economics perspective on gun violence. And now we know what is the next frontier sort of thing to figure out? How do we scale this stuff? How do we deliver it? So what are the policy implications of this? The problem is these 10 minute windows, okay? Let us not keep arguing about whether we should be doing more bigger sticks or bigger carrots in these 10 minute windows. Let's focus instead on doing two types of things for which we have really good randomized experimental evidence or natural experiment evidence now. One is changing what kids bring with them into these 10 minute windows. That is programs like Becoming a Man, but not just Becoming a Man. We've looked at a bunch of different programs, Choose To Change, run by Brightpoint and YAP, the Ready Program Run by Heartland Alliance. All of these programs look a little bit different. They use different curricula. They have one shared feature, which is helping people anticipate when their system one responses are gonna get them in trouble. And you consistently see encouraging evidence of big reductions in violence involvement. And I would say K-12 schooling winds up operating under the same sort of mechanism. Helping people be more reflective. If you're on the right, you're looking at that and thinking that seems ridiculous. That's Hug-a-Thug. If you're on the left, you're looking at this and saying this is a distraction from addressing root causes and yet, and yet that's not what the evidence says. Right? And I think the other thing, the other thing that we need to be thinking about is not just changing what people bring into the situation, but changing the situations themselves, but in a very particular way. So in 1961, Jane Jacobs wrote "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," and she was talking about the huge variation in safety rates among equally disadvantaged neighborhoods. And she argued, Eyes on the Street are the key explanation for that. Under the conventional wisdom that it's all incentives that makes no sense with the benefit of however many more years of behavioral economics we have since then, we now understand why eyes on the street are so important. And that can be any sort of pro-social adult who's willing to step in and diffuse these. It could be a cop, it could be an unarmed private security guard of the sort that we all have all over Hyde Park. It could be a community violence intervention outreach worker. It could be a neighborhood adult walking to the corner store, which is why Jane Jacobs was arguing so much for mixed residential use. And we have a ton of evidence that suggests that all of this stuff is helpful in reducing violent crime specifically and is preventive. Okay. This also helps us understand the mystery of Greater Grand Crossing versus South Shore and why violence rates differ so much. Okay, so what are people bringing into the situation? So Sendhil and Eldar Shafir, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, have a wonderful book called "Scarcity," where they argue that living in situations of high stress depletes mental bandwidth for people. If system two is effortful, that leads people to rely more on system one in navigating daily whatever. And when you look at the data, you can see that there's lots more disorder, premature mortality, a bunch of stressors in Greater Grand Crossing than South Shore. If you read "Nudge" by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, there's a wonderful analogy in there about you put someone who's never golfed before on a putting green. And by the end of the day with a day of practice, they've gotten much better. You put someone who's never golfed on a putting green and you blindfold them after a day of practice, they've gotten no better. So feedback is the key part of learning from trial and error. And in neighborhoods like Greater Grand Crossing, the police, for whatever reason that we don't quite understand, are much faster to make arrests for minor misdemeanor offenses. So the cost to kids of getting feedback is much higher in Greater Grand Crossing. And finally, you can see in the data, partly because South Shore is along the lake, that developed much more mixed use residential and commercial. So there are many more eyes on the street. And so now we've got a way to understand all of this previously unexplained variation. So let me just say two final things and then I'll stop and we'll open it up for questions. So you might be thinking, well, this sounds good for a couple sort of proof of concept RCTs, but can we really imagine sort of an at scale way to get out of this problem with this way of thinking? And here's one of my favorite graphs that we've produced at the crime lab. This shows it takes a very long view about murder rates in the three biggest cities in the country. Going back to 1890 when I was just finishing graduate school. And you can see the murder rates per capita of these three cities are remarkably similar for most of this period, with two exceptions. One is the 1920s during the Al Capone era, okay? And this takes us up through 1991, the peak of the crack cocaine epidemic, the murder rates are identical in all three cities. New York and LA, if you look at their policy planning documents, behavioral science, behavioral economics, is nowhere in there. But in practice they were doing exactly what you would've wanted them to do. A bunch of other things that you don't necessarily want them to do, but included in that bundle a bunch of things that a behavioral scientist would want them to do. And what we've seen over that period from 1991 to 2019, the murder rate dropped by nearly 80% in LA and nearly 90% in New York. There's not a city in the United States that would not wish for those public safety outcomes. Okay, lemme close on one. Okay, actually two more quick points. So I think part of the problem in our thinking about this problem of gun violence and probably criminal justice more generally is, that we've been too narrowly focused in targeting all of our policies on system two. Okay? Which is just a small share of what our minds do, and this is how that's been going. So in the 1930s we had FDR saying, let's worry about root causes. In the 1980s, we had Ronald Reagan saying, let's do something else and use bigger sticks. Then we had Chelsea, no, what's his name? Chesa Boudin, sorry. We had a bunch of progressive prosecutors saying, let's undo that. Then we had a bunch of voters saying, we don't like that, right? We don't wanna go another a hundred years cycling policy, cycling back and forth and not solving the problem. I think that we need to be thinking about our policies as being much more attentive to the fact that there's another type of cognition that our minds are engaging in that I think is really, really underappreciatedly important for gun violence. The last thing that I will say, and then we'll open it up is, I know I've spent a lot of time around, I've been a professor for a long time, I know. Every professor I know believes that the thing that they're working on is the most important thing there is. So the final thing that I wanna do is I wanna convince you why I, unlike those other jokers, is actually right. So my University of Chicago colleague Steve Levitt, wrote a paper 20 years ago with Julie Cullen at the University of California San Diego, where they showed every serious crime that happens in a city reduces its population on net by one person, through less inflow and more out migration. Every murder specifically that happens in a city reduces the city's population by fully 70 people. Okay? And so what is the implication of that? So let me show you, this is a graph that shows you the population of New York and Detroit normalized to each city's 1950 population. So each data point here is the city's population at a given year as a fraction of that city's 1950 population. You can see I grew up in Southern New Jersey. We would take all of our German relatives in the seventies and eighties and in New York. I can tell you from firsthand observation, New York was not a great place at that time. You can see their population was down 10% relative to its 1950 value. Lots of different things are causing city growth. It's not just public safety, but public safety is an important part of it. You can see as New York became safe, it grew, population grew by 20% over that period. Detroit, in contrast, is consistently one of the most violent cities in the country. And you can see from 1950 to today, their population has fallen by fully two thirds. And if you're reading anything about Detroit in the New York Times and other national papers, you'll realize it is insanely difficult for Detroit to deliver any sort of quality public service to residents. When you have one third of the people in a city whose footprint has not changed, it's super hard to deliver quality public schools. It's super hard to pay off your pension debt. It's super hard to keep the infrastructure maintained, to do economic development, to do anything. This is all to say, I've become convinced that gun violence sits upstream of almost every other problem that cities worry about. Okay? And so the final thing I just wanna leave you with is, so there's New York and there's Detroit, where's Chicago? Chicago winds up being literally on the knife edge between going in the direction of New York and going in the direction of Detroit, right? And so this is why I think I'm particularly excited now that we might be able to see a different way of thinking about this problem, given this hugely important inflection moment that we have for our home city. Thank you very much.

- [Jens Ludwig] Thank you so much for that talk. We're gonna start the Q & A portion of the evening. So if you have a question, feel free to raise your hand and one of us with a microphone will come and find you. While we're doing that, we're gonna start things off with a question from Zoom, our online viewers. Thanks for joining us. So Sarah M wonders, how do you engage on this contentious topic with those who strongly oppose any gun control or maybe have any strong prior commitment about this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, you know, I've spent a, I've spent a bunch of time trying to think about the answer to that question. I'll just very quickly say like, I think for starters, for starters, I would say with empathy and here was sort of the light bulb moment for me reflecting on the debate that we just had in Chicago around ShotSpotter. Okay? Let me try and talk you very quickly through the analogy, right? Where there were a bunch of people, so the crime lab did some research that suggested that ShotSpotter doesn't prevent crimes, but it gets first responders to shooting scenes more quickly and saves lives, okay? And so then we went and we testified to the city council, we wrote a thing in the Tribune and there were a bunch of people who thought, I don't care if this saves lives. There is a larger principle at stake here, which is, this is police surveillance of communities and we have a right to privacy. And I think you have to take that position. See there's like some instrumentalist goal and some fundamental principle that people believe in where they think this is bigger than any sort of instrumental goal. You might agree with that perspective, you might disagree with that perspective, but you can see people are like, I don't care if more people will die as a result of this, this principle is just too important. And that helped me see, at least, that there are a bunch of people who think that exact same way about the Second Amendment. That might not be the way that people in this room think about the Second Amendment, but there are clearly a bunch of people who do. And so I would think of a conversation along the lines of I do not think that you are, if I have a different view of the Second Amendment than you, I do not think that you're a bad person. I don't think that I can't find common ground. And I think one of the things that I like about the behavioral economics or behavioral science perspective about gun violence, is left and right can agree that the best way to deal with gun violence is preventing it in the first place. So thank you. Questions in the room?

- [June] Nope, oh, hello. Hi professor, my name is June Kong. It feels like your solution kind of comes down to teaching kids emotional regulation of like, when you're challenged you need to know how to deescalate those things. But then your timeline slide is very interesting because you say that we're roughly at the same level as we were a hundred years ago, but in the middle we went up a lot. And I was wondering if there's any way to back test like what happened during those middle sections that made America much more violent?

- [Jens Ludwig] Yeah, let me, you know, I think sort of the. Let me take your question and zoom back even further in the timeline. So Stephen Pinker, the Harvard psychologist or whatever, whatever field, he spans multiple fields. Steven Pinker has a wonderful book called, "The Better Angels of Our Nature." And one of the things that you see in the Pinker book is there are, you know, there are a bunch of countries around, or not that many, but some of the countries around the world, especially England, you can get data on homicide rates per capita, other markers of violence going back hundreds of years. And what you can see is that there's a long-term decline in violence rates per capita leading up to about 1900. And then that flattens out. And I've seen some data indicating that there are some suggestion that you might have have something similar in the United States as well. That there were declines in interpersonal violence up until 1900 and then things flattened out. Now there are some ups and downs that I think many people think are driven by either cohort changes, like the baby boom came on the scene, or drug epidemics, whatever it is. We don't really quite understand that up and down, but the pattern across countries in a long-term sense seems to be like. So the Pinker explanation for why violence was going down, is society was changing in ways that rewarded people for being more attentive, like getting people economic exchange. Like once you're more interdependent, gets people to become better at taking other people's perspective, for instance, right? And everybody's got strong incentives to get better at that. And Pinker argues in his book, which is very consistent with this argument, that that would be one explanation for the long. Somehow, that happy inadvertent change in people's thinking seems to have plateaued. And I think one way to think about what I'm arguing for in the book, is at this point we need to be more deliberate. It's not a happy byproduct of society changing. We need to be more intentional and deliberate about that. And maybe the only other thing that I would just say is I wouldn't want you to walk away and think the only thing that we can do is put money into social programs, because there's also a bunch of changes in the larger built environment and social environment that can increase eyes on the street as well. Right? And I think that also, you know, for instance, if the mayor of Chicago saw this, he would hear lots of things like, I am very happy to promote economic development, more commercial development in Englewood and Garfield Park and Roseland and Austin and on and on and on, right? Like that would be the part of the city's current agenda that I would say, let's turn that, you city of Chicago are super excited to do that. You don't have a ton of money to do everything that's on your list. Focus on that and turn the dial up there to 11.

- [Audience] The timeline chart goes up in the middle to the thirties to like the eighties and it comes back down.

- [Jens Ludwig] Oh, why is it going down?

- [Audience] Why is there a hump in the middle of American crime?

- [Jens Ludwig] Yeah, the, I think that's the, it's changes in cohort size compare combined with drug epidemics.

- [Audience] Is that per capita? Sorry. I'm just very curious.

- [Jens Ludwig] Yeah, so just to build on this, it's young people who are disproportionately involved in violence. And so even on a graph where we're looking at murder rates per capita, when the fraction of people in the population who are young goes up, the overall per capita rate of violence winds up going up as well. Does that make sense? Okay. I don't know who's got the microphone. Chris, I'll let you pick.

- [Audience] Okay. I was wondering from your chart of Chicago, New York and LA, it looks like violence dropped precipitously in New York and LA and not in Chicago. And so I'm wondering like what can we learn from New York and LA about that?

- [Jens Ludwig] Yeah, I think when I talk to people who are in city government in various capacities in LA and New York, like they, they all tell different versions of the same story, which I also think is consistent with parts of what we see in the research literature as well. And so they pointed two things that those two cities did. One is that they were early and rapid adopters of data-driven policing. So why is that important? That's important because these 10 minute windows of conflict have some predictable structure to them. So for instance, when I was driving around with the gang homicide team on the South Side of Chicago, one place that we would go to frequently was a liquor store at 57th and State. And the reason that we would go there all the time is that was a liquor store that stayed open later than the other liquor stores on the South Side of Chicago. So every other liquor store closes at, let's say two, that one's open till, let's say three. Now you've got a bunch of people who normally go to the liquor store in their gang territory, and between two and three, all of a sudden people from all over the south side, including people with beefs, with one another, show up in the same liquor store, standing in the same line behind the bulletproof glass waiting to buy their whatever. And then you wonder why there's a bunch of shootings. Data-driven policing says, I've got an idea about where we should prioritize a car, 57th and State between two and 3:00 AM. So those two cities were both early and rapid adopters of that. And the other thing that they did is they were early and rapid adopters of community violence intervention. These are nonprofits, that again, try and figure out where these 10 minute windows of conflict are gonna be, and then have somebody there to sort of step in and deescalate, right? And they made big inve. The city of Chicago is starting to make investments in that area, but New York and LA were doing this from many, many years ago.

- [Audience]  Are you optimistic that Chicago is learning something from these other states? Do you think that Chicago's gonna get better at this?

- [Jens Ludwig] Yeah, I mean, you know, I remember Steve Levit, I was in a meeting with Steve Levitt once and he said, "Only idiots make predictions." And so I'm trying to think about how I should answer your question. Perfect. I mean, what I would, here's what I would say is I would say the mayor and the business community have become very committed to finding resources to invest in community violence intervention. And I would say that our police superintendent that we have right now, the Chicago Police Department, in my opinion, is terrific and really gets it. And so if you were looking for grounds for optimism, if you believe what everybody is saying about what happened in LA New York, you would look at the fundamentals here and say, it looks like we might be going in the right direction. How much? We have time for one more question, okay. Oka, over here.

- [Audience] Thank you so much for speaking to us. My question is about kind of role of families in preventing gun violence. So you showed kind of like the becoming a man interventions. What do parents have to kind of do in interventions early on teaching their kids like emotional maturity with a, you know, taking into consideration that there is a lot of generational trauma within those families already. It's like, how can you, parents are often overwhelmed. They don't have time to take care of the kids in the same way that maybe they should because of work. It's like, this seems to me like almost like a bigger systemic problem, but I'm curious to kind of hear your thoughts about that.

- [Jens Ludwig] Yeah, I, you know, one of the papers that I teach in my crime class at the University of Chicago is a study of this program that many of you would be familiar with called the Nurse Family Partnership. And so what they do is they basically find first time teenage moms and they send a nurse to their house to work with them on parenting basically. Which is, I can tell you having two daughters of my own, one of whom's hiding up here in the front row, is insanely difficult. And what's interesting about what the Nurse Family Partnership, what the nurses do with the parents is they wind up doing a bunch of behavioral science, things that are effectively behavioral science with the parents, right? So it's like, one, if you don't have kids, what I'm about to say is gonna seem crazy to you. If you do have kids, you are like, amen. That totally sounds like me. Is like, you have a kid and you've got a big meeting the next day and it's three o'clock in the morning and your kid wakes up screaming and won't go back to sleep. As a parent, it is almost impossible not to look at your sweet little kid and think, why are you doing this to me? You know I have this meeting at 7:00 AM tomorrow upon which this huge thing hinges. Why will you not go, right? Behavioral scientists would look at that and say, that's personalization. We all have egocentric constructs or whatever. And the nurse helps the mom see, you know what? The kid is not intentionally crying to make you be in a horrible mind set for your meeting tomorrow. Your kid is crying because your kid is crying. And it helps the kids. So it helps the parents sort of depersonalize and be less likely to rely on violence with their kid, which then helps create a bunch of sort of downstream benefits. So I hope that's sort of a responsive response. I'm getting the zero time from, I'm happy to stick around and answer more questions, but I think I'm getting the hook from the CDR people. Thank you all again for coming out.