Book Talk | Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence with Jens Ludwig

What if everything we understood about gun violence was wrong? 

Join the Penn Institute for Urban Research for a book talk and thought-provoking discussion with Jens Ludwig, Crime Lab Pritzker Director at the University of Chicago and author of Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Hosted in collaboration with the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, this book talk will explore how behavioral science offers a new framework for addressing one of America’s most pressing crises.

About the book:

“Ludwig thinks more deeply about the causes of American gun violence than anyone, and his policy solutions have been proven to work. Unforgiving Places is the best book on American violence I’ve ever read.” 

– Steven Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics

In 2007, economist Jens Ludwig moved to the South Side of Chicago to research two big questions: Why does gun violence happen, and is there anything we can do about it? Almost two decades later, the answers aren’t what he expected. Unforgiving Places is Ludwig’s revelatory portrait of gun violence in America’s most famously maligned city.

Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic while others don’t, Ludwig shows gun violence to be more circumstantial—and more solvable—than our traditional approaches lead us to believe.

Drawing on decades of research and Ludwig’s immersive fieldwork in Chicago, including “countless hours spent in schools, parks, playgrounds, housing developments, courtrooms, jails, police stations, police cars, and lots and lots of McDonald’ses,” Unforgiving Places is a breakthrough work at the cutting edge of behavioral economics. As Ludwig shows, progress on gun violence doesn’t require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.

Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, and co-director of the Education Lab.