Speaker: Jens Ludwig, University of Chicago
Abstract: Conventional wisdom for the past 100 years has generally assumed that gun violence stems from people making deliberate, rational benefit-cost calculations. That’s led public policy to focus on disincentivizing gun violence either through bigger sticks (prison) or bigger carrots (jobs or social programs to lure people away from crime). It is not obvious those approaches have worked: the murder rate in the U.S. is about the same today as it was in 1900. One reason conventional wisdom hasn’t given us better results is because conventional wisdom misunderstands what gun violence actually is. In this talk, Jens Ludwig will discuss his new book, Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, which argues that a behavioral economics perspective gives us a better way to understand – and make progress on – the part of the crime problem the American public cares most about.