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The Dream

A fine suit made just for me. From the best fabrics. By the best tailor. Paired with the best bespoke shoes.

A suit that would make me feel at ease, while declaring to others, “Here is a man who feels at ease.” A suit that would be appreciated by the world’s most heartless maître d’. A suit that would see me through the immigration checkpoints of difficult countries. A suit that would convince readers that the man in the author photo has a sense of taste beyond the Brooklyn consensus of plaid shirt and pouf of graying hair.

The suit would serve as the perfect carapace for a personality overly dependent on anxious humor and jaundiced wit, a personality that I have been trying to develop since I saw my lightly mustached punim in the mirror as a pubescent boy and thought, How will I ever find love? The suit would transcend my physicality and bond with my personality directly. It would accompany me through the world’s great salons, the occasional MSNBC appearance, and, most important, the well-compensated talks at far-flung universities. The suit would be nothing less than an extension of myself; it would be a valet preceding me into the room, announcing with a light continental accent, “Mr. Gary and his suit are here now.” Finding this perfect suit, made by the most advanced tailor out of superlative fabric, would do nothing less than transform me.

The Body

Before there is a suit, there is a body, and the body is terrible.

First there is my shortness (5 foot 5 and a half, with that “half” doing a lot of work). Being short is fine, but those missing inches are wedded to a narrow-shouldered body of zero distinction. Although I am of Russian and Jewish extraction, the continent whose clothing stores make me feel most at ease is Asia. (I once bought an off-the-rack jacket in Bangkok after the clerk examined me for all of three seconds.) However, this is not exactly an Asian body either, especially when I contrast myself with the natural slimness of most of my Asian friends. Just before my bar mitzvah, I got a set of perfect B-cup knockers and had to squeeze into a “husky” suit to perform the ritual yodeling at the synagogue. But that’s not all. Some hideously mismanaged childhood vaccination in Leningrad created a thick keloid scar running the length of my right shoulder. The shame of having this strange pink welt define one side of me led to a slumped posture favoring my left shoulder. When I finally found people to have sex with me—I had to attend Oberlin to complete the task—my expression upon disrobing resembled that of a dog looking up at his mistress after a bowel movement of hazmat proportions.

Before the Suit

The clothes before the suit were as bad as the body.

I was born in the Soviet Union in 1972 and was quickly dressed in a sailor’s outfit with white tights and sexy little shorts, then given a balalaika to play with for the camera. The fact that Russia now fields one of the world’s most homicidal armies can partially be explained by photos such as this. On other occasions I was forced to wear very tight jogging pants with a cartoon bunny on them, or a thick-striped shirt dripping with medals from battles I had never seen. These outfits did make me feel like I belonged to something—in this case, a failing dictatorship. I left the U.S.S.R. before I could join the Young Pioneers, which would have entailed wearing a red tie at a tender age, while prancing about and shouting exuberant slogans such as “I am always ready!”

Top: The author, about 6 years old, in Leningrad, dressed as a sailor and forced to play balalaika under a hanging carpet. Bottom: About a year later, in Rome, his parents buy him a normal Western sweater. (Courtesy of Gary Shteyngart)

What I wasn’t ready for, however, was immigration to Queens. I arrived in New York in 1979 with the immigrant’s proverbial single shirt, although my parents had managed to snag a cute Italian V-neck sweater during the few months we spent in Rome on our way to America, a sweater that would serve me for the next half decade (as mentioned, I did not grow much). The Hebrew day school to which I was sentenced for eight years began a clothing drive for me, and I was rewarded with pounds of old Batman and Robin T-shirts, which made me look like a Soviet-refugee poster child. It’s worth noting that, growing up, I never thought, They hate me for my clothes or my poverty or my lack of English skills. This realization would come later, in hindsight. For the longest time, I thought that I was hated for the essential state of being myself; the clothes were more a symptom than a cause. My school may have been Jewish, but I somehow found myself in the throes of Calvinist predestination. For as long as I was myself, I deserved these clothes. Around this time, the idea of becoming an entirely different person took root—How will I ever find love? This is how—an idea that would be expanded for four decades, until it finally led me to The Suit.

Growing Up Tasteless

High school found me trying to blend in with a suburban outlay of clothes that my now middle-class family could finally afford. These were surfer T-shirts from Ocean Pacific and other brands that suburbanites who survived the 1980s might remember: Generra, Aéropostale, Unionbay. Unfortunately, I did not go to high school in Benetton Bay, Long Island, but in Manhattan, where these shirts were immediately a joke. (This would become a pattern. By the time I figure something out fashion-wise, I’m already two steps behind.) At a high-school job, my boss bought me a set of colorful Miami Vice–style shirts and jackets. These proved ridiculous at Oberlin, where dressing in janitor uniforms from thrift shops was considered the height of style. (Ironically, I had worked as a janitor during the summer, at the same nuclear laboratory that employed my father.)

After college, I fell in with a crowd of artsy, ketamine-addicted hipsters, and together we managed to gentrify several Brooklyn neighborhoods during the late ’90s. One of my friends, who was especially fashion-conscious, began to dress me at the high-priced secondhand emporium Screaming Mimis. The clothes she told me to buy were very itchy, mostly Orlon and Dacron items from ’70s brands such as Triumph of California, but these tight uniforms, like their Soviet predecessors, made me feel like I was playing a part in a grander opera, while also serving as a form of punishment. On nervous dates, I would sometimes have to run to the bathroom to try to angle my acrylic armpits under the dryer.

Because I was a writer who worked in bed, I mostly did not need a suit, although when I got married, in 2012, I went down to Paul Smith to get a herringbone number that I thought was just fine, if not terribly exciting. I bought a J.Crew tuxedo for black-tie benefits. Once, I did a reading sponsored by Prada and was given a nice gray jacket, pants, and a pair of blue suede shoes as compensation. Come to think of it, there was also a scarf. As a final note, I will say that I am incredibly cheap and that shopping for clothes has always raised my blood pressure. Leaving Screaming Mimis after spending more than $500 would always end in me getting terribly drunk to punish myself for the money I had blown on such a frivolous pursuit.

The Dream Begins

When I reached the age of 50, mildly prosperous and with a small family, I met a man named Mark Cho. We discovered each other because of a mutual love of wristwatches (a costly middle-aged hobby I had recently acquired), and because I knew about his classic-menswear store, the Armoury, with locations in New York and Hong Kong. The Armoury has been called “a clubhouse for menswear nerds”; if you’re looking for, say, a cashmere waistcoat in “brown sugar,” you have found your home. I had even given one of the characters in my latest novel, a dandy from a prominent Korean chaebol family, an article of clothing from that store to wear.

[Read: The future of marketing is bespoke everything]

We met for dinner at Union Square Cafe, and I liked him (and his clothes) immediately. Mark was almost always dressed in a jacket and tie, and would often sport a vest along with spectacles made of some improbable metal. What I loved about him was how comfortable he appeared in his medley of classical attire, and how, despite the fact that all of his garments had been chosen with precision, he gave the impression that he had spent very little time and thought on which breathable fabrics to settle over his trim body. He looked like he was, to use my initial formulation, at ease.

Later, I would learn that this whole look could be summarized by the Italian word sprezzatura, or “studied carelessness,” and later still I learned of something that the Japanese had discovered and refined: “Ivy style,” which is basically studied carelessness goes to Dartmouth. For the time being, I knew that I liked what I saw, that my inner lonely immigrant—the one who is always trying to find a uniform that will help me fit in—was intrigued. Mark once gave me an Armoury safari jacket, the very same one worn by the character in my novel, and its light, unflappable linen proved perfect for my summer readings around Germany and Switzerland that year. Everywhere from starchy Zurich to drunken Cologne to cool-as-fuck Berlin, the jacket would pop out of a suitcase and unwrinkle itself in seconds, yet it was also stylish and seemingly impervious to the odors of my non-Teutonic body. It was, to use Hemingway-esque prose, damn well perfect, and I immediately knew I wanted more.

I had lived in Italy in my 30s and met many aristocrats there. Those bastards had sprezzatura to burn, but when I asked them the make of their suits and jackets, they would smile and tell me it was the work of a single tailor down in Naples or up in Milan. Ah, I would say to myself, so that’s how it is. Given my outlook on life, owning a bespoke suit was not an outcome I was predestined for. The Prada jacket I had been given, which fit me well enough, was the most that my Calvinist God would ever grant me.

But over more martinis and onglets au poivre with Mark, I began to understand the parameters of a fine bespoke suit and its accessories: bespoke shirts and bespoke shoes. I also began to timidly ask questions of a financial nature and learned that the price of owning such a wardrobe approached and then exceeded $10,000. I did not want to pay this kind of entry fee. Given my own family’s experience in fleeing a declining superpower, I try to have money saved with which to escape across the border. Unlike watches, a suit could not be resold in Montreal or Melbourne.

A brief but generative conversation with my editors at this magazine soon paved the way for my dream to become possible. At a particularly unsober dinner with a visiting Japanese watchmaker, I whispered to Mark the extent of my desires. Yes, it would take a lot of work, a lot of research, and possibly travel to two other continents. But it could be done. At the right expense, with the most elegant and sturdy of Italian-milled fabrics, and with the greatest of Japanese tailors, a superior suit could be made for anyone, even for me.

Some Thoughts on Male Fashion

In religious school, I studied the Torah and the Talmud, which were okay but failed to leave a deep impression. At Oberlin, I read Gramsci’s notebooks from prison; those were fine, but a little too carceral for my airy disposition. Mark sat me down with the foundational texts more relevant to my lived experience, as they say. Or at least the experience I hoped to live. The canonical texts of male fashion, and I urge them upon any aspiring dandy, are Dressing the Man, by Alan Flusser, and True Style, by G. Bruce Boyer (that name alone deserves a cummerbund). I would also slip in an interesting national study, Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style, by the well-dressed intellectual W. David Marx, whom I would meet in Tokyo soon enough. Like the diligent student I had rarely been before, I took copious notes: American look, dart, London shrunk, natural shoulder, weft, warp. I have worn clothes all my life but never known a single thing about them. It was like not knowing the difference between freshly caught tilefish and farm-bred tilapia; each fills your stomach, but only one tastes good.

Formal male fashion traces back to two personalities: Beau Brummell, the sharp-witted proto-dandy of the early 19th century without whom the modern suit would be unthinkable (and who reportedly spent five hours a day getting dressed), and Edward VIII, the Nazi admirer and short-term king better known as the Duke of Windsor. These two insufferable assholes are mostly responsible for how men dress today. “With Brummell,” Flusser notes, “male style became a matter of impeccable fit and cut, exquisite detail, and immaculate cleanliness.” Before Brummell, the aristocracy dressed in rich, smelly materials; after, styles were adapted from military uniforms—think of the broad shoulders of a British pinstripe suit, for example. The duke took Brummell’s simplicity and “ran to Baroque elaboration,” Boyer wrote. “District checks, windowpane plaids, bold stripes, and tartans were his true métier.”

In the battle between the 19th-century dandy’s stark simplicity and the duke’s playful elaborations, I find myself choosing the former. My personality is colorful enough without tartans; let the suit merely contain it. Whatever the duke’s “district check” is, I will leave it uncashed.

Yamamoto-San Arrives

On May 24 of the fateful year 2024, a plane from Tokyo landed in New York City, carrying one of the most meticulously attired men in existence. His name is Yuhei Yamamoto, and he is the preeminent representative of Ivy style, that mode of dress that Americans appreciate yet only the Japanese fully understand.

The British suit, in all its City of London severity, morphed into different shapes around the world. The Italians made particularly interesting work of it. The Milanese suit was the most British-like, but as you traveled farther down the boot to Florence, Rome, and Naples, the tailors became more freehanded; the colors and fit became jauntier and more Mediterranean, more appreciative of bodies defined by crooked lines and curves and exploded by carbohydrates. Meanwhile, in America, as always, we went to work. The suit became a uniform that stressed the commonality and goodness of Protestant labor and church attendance without any further embellishments. It came to be known as the “sack suit.” In the 1950s, Brooks Brothers furthered this concept with an almost subversively casual look: a jacket with natural-width shoulders that hung straight from the body, and plain-front trousers. This, along with other American touches, such as denim, became the basis for Ivy-style clothes that the Japanese of the ’60s made into a national obsession, and that culminated in a wholly different approach to workwear, office wear, and leisure wear. Today, you can’t go into a Uniqlo without seeing the aftereffects of Japanese experimentation with and perfection of our “Work hard, pray hard” wardrobe ethos.

I met Yamamoto-san at the Upper East Side branch of Mark Cho’s Armoury empire. The moment I first saw him, I was scared. No one could be this well-dressed. No one could be so secure in a tan three-piece seersucker suit that didn’t so much hang from his broad shoulders as hover around them in expectation. No one’s brown silk tie could so well match his brown polka-dot pocket square and the thick wedge of only slightly graying hair floating above his perfectly chiseled face. This man was going to make a suit for me? I was not worthy.

Yamamoto-san examined me briefly and said, “Sack suit.”

The author’s chest is expertly measured by the master tailor Yuhei Yamamoto at the Upper East Side location of the Armoury. (Peter Fisher for The Atlantic)

The diagnosis stung at first. I was already aware of the provenance of the sack suit, which had clothed men up and down the very avenue (Madison) right outside Mark’s store for almost a century. Was I not more than an Excel jockey or a finance bro whose oppressive job had him ready to be put into a sack? Were my curves, at least the double trouble posed by my tatas (true, they had shrunk and mellowed with age), not worthy of something with a little bit more Florentine flair, if not full-on Neapolitan decadence?

“Sack suit,” Yamamoto-san repeated. He then explained through a translator that I was, in his eyes, “full of character.” I had heard this sentiment before, and not always in the form of a compliment, but wanted elaboration. “You’re a character,” he said. “You’re an authentic New Yorker. You transcend fashionable suits. As an authentic New Yorker, you need a sack suit.”

He and Mark began to talk about the master plan for my body. Yamamoto-san would make a drape-cut suit that would emphasize my slimness, and “flatter” my chest. The pants would accentuate my legs while making me look taller than 5 foot 5 (and a half).

“You can hide a multitude of sins with a good suit,” Mark said. The Calvinist inside me blanched.

For the first time in my life, I felt nonphysician, nonlover hands all over me—measuring, prodding, taking stock. The thousands of dollars being spent on this project were not just creating a garment; they were affording me a new level of care and involvement. It was the sartorial version of having a concierge doctor. “At the fitting stage,” Mark said, “you’ll feel like a woman getting haute couture. Why should women have all the fun?”

Yes, I thought. Why should they? We retired to the Armoury’s garden to smoke half a dozen short Davidoff cigars and discuss matters some more. “Clothing is a visual language,” Mark said. “What we have to divine is: What is a Gary Shteyngart suit?”

I puffed on my cigar, feeling seen. “Your head has to sit in a certain way on your frame,” Mark said. I pictured my head above the suit, like the dot at the top of an inverted exclamation point. The suit, according to Mark, would focus attention on my head, which was definitely where I wanted the attention to fall. After mastering English in Hebrew day school and social democracy at Oberlin, I had always made the right sounds with my head. (“I want to make a suit that accentuates my client’s character,” Yamamoto-san had told me. “I don’t want a suit that speaks more than the character.”)

“The best body type for a suit,” Mark went on, “is one that is slightly unathletic and also stoops slightly so that it hangs better.” That’s me! I thought, shocked that what I’d considered a debility had turned out to be a strength. “Yamamoto-san will make a softer, rounder, more natural shoulder,” Mark continued. “He will cut closer to the hips. You don’t want a pumpkin shape.”

“Most certainly not,” I said.

Back inside, Yamamoto-san had set the music system to his beloved Chuck Berry and had spread out ancient Esquire and GQ magazines. “I will make you a suit from the golden age of American style,” the tailor was saying. “I will make your legs even more beautiful.” We were looking at intimidating books of fabric swatches. I had signaled that I wanted the suit to be ready for nights of leisure as well as labor; drunken dinners at Frenchette as well as university readings and television appearances. This led us to the darker side of the color spectrum, until we settled on midnight blue. “Six-ply is more durable, and it travels well,” Mark was saying. “There’s more return. See how it bounces back more quickly? Fewer wrinkles.”

That all sounded great, but I was both intrigued and confused. What the hell is “six-ply”? How is yarn even made? Mark invited me to attend a fabric fair in Milan in July, then to journey to the nearby fabric mill, where the materials for my suit would be prepared. Next, we would fly to Hong Kong to have the appropriate shirts made by the fine shirtmaker Ascot Chang, and on to Tokyo for a second fitting with Yamamoto-san, as well as a fitting for a pair of shoes at the atelier of the master shoemaker Yohei Fukuda.

“Sure,” I said.

Somewhere in the heavens, my Calvinist God was preparing his lightning bolts.

The Anticipation Grows

There are many days between May and July. How many exactly I cannot tell you, as I am not a mathematician, but definitely too many when you’re waiting for a series of garments to change your life.

In the meantime, Mark threw a black-tie party to celebrate 10 years of the Armoury in New York, and I put on my J.Crew tuxedo, hoping no one would sneer at its humble pedigree. The party was sponsored by Campari, and I was soon coasting on boulevardiers and chatting with a gaggle of short menswear nerds and the attractive women who loved them. As with most Midtown parties, the mix had its share of financiers, but also included war-crimes prosecutors and museum executives. “Are you in fashion?” I overheard one attendee asking another. “No, I’m a Marxist.” (And, I later found out, an architect.)

[From the June 2009 issue: Fashion in dark times]

Alex Seo, a Korean American man dressed stunningly in a white double-breasted, peak-lapel tuxedo jacket, told me that when his grandfather, an academic, had landed in the Midwest from Korea many years ago without a proper outfit, the man who’d sponsored him had said, “Every professor should have a tweed jacket,” and then handed him his own. The story reminded me of the clothing drive that was started for me at my yeshiva, although this tale had a kinder, more midwestern ending (Alex’s father and his Armoury suit were also at the party). Looking around the room and talking to people, I realized just how many of us were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. The need for a fine suit became obvious. It was the final certificate of naturalization.

Milan and Beyond

I tried to take my mind off my desperate need for bespoke clothing. A conference brought me to Tbilisi, Georgia, and then I tooled around Istanbul, Rome, and Lucca for a bit. Finally, the fabric fair arrived, and, accompanied by my old friend, the stylish Tuscan resident, art historian, and translator Shilpa Prasad, I traveled to Milan, where Mark was waiting for us.

“We’re starting way upstream,” Mark told me, meaning that we were going deep into the nitty-gritty of how a suit is made. Amid the city’s heartless July humidity, he took us to a neoclassical palazzo, where Dormeuil, a family-run French maker of high-end fabrics, presented us with endless espresso and samples. I wasn’t here to shop, just to learn what was possible.

Testing crease-resistant fabric at Vitale Barberis Canonico, the oldest fabric mill in Italy (Bea De Giacomo for The Atlantic)

What followed was an impressive display of discernment. Mark and his colleague Jan would feel the square of a fabric swatch, then scrunch it up and watch as it regained its composure. “Fabric drives our collection,” Mark said. “For Hong Kong, this is good winter fabric,” he said of one sample. Because Hong Kong represents a large portion of his business, he is very attuned to that part of his clientele. “This one’s too hairy,” he said of another. “Hong Kong people don’t like things that are hairy.” Most people don’t, I thought, sadly.

Shilpa was amazed by how Mark and Jan knew which samples they would buy from just a cursory feel. “It’s like muscle memory,” Jan told her.

“We’ll take four meters,” Mark told the fabric salesman, and the barcode adjoining one swatch was zapped. The price for this particular fabric, which would become a three-piece suit for another client, was about 68 euros a meter. Shilpa lovingly stroked cloth flecked with gold that clocked in at 380 euros a meter, and visualized the shawl that could be made from it.

Mark explained that some fabrics are better for business suits, others for leisure suits. As an example of the former, he showed me the kind of slightly shiny wool-and-mohair blend that could have been worn by members of the Rat Pack. The fabric for my suit should bridge the gap, Mark said. It should be both beautiful and travel-resistant. “More texture, less sheen.”

The Milano Unica fair took place in a typical soulless convention center on the city’s edge. The booths where the vendors had set up shop were grouped by the type of goods they were hawking: Shirt Avenue, for example. The sellers we visited each gave us a fine cup of espresso and sometimes even a little chocolate, so that by the time I left the fair, I was orbiting Neptune.

We stopped by the esteemed Somerset cloth maker Fox Brothers, which produced the fabric that once draped Winston Churchill and Cary Grant. They favor undyed sheep’s wool and are known for their wool flannel, the kind that was used to make Fred Astaire’s trousers. The clothes made from their fabrics, one trench coat in particular, were gorgeous, but I would have needed to buy a Land Rover to complete the look.

Next we headed down the “street” to the booth for Vitale Barberis Canonico, the mill tasked with producing the fabric for my suit. After we had another coffee, the attractive representatives of the brand presented us with bolts of cloth to feel. “This reminds me of going to sari shops in Bombay,” Shilpa said as we felt our way through the sensuous wares, gasping in delight. I was reminded of Mark’s quip: “Why should women have all the fun?”

A sample of the fabric that would be used for my suit was finally presented to me—the 21 Micron. I was told that the mill’s 21 Micron is made from the wool of Argentinian and Uruguayan sheep that live high in the mountains. Regular, less important sheep are subjected to the cruelty of mulesing, where strips of wool-bearing skin are removed from around their ass, to prevent the parasitic infection of fly larvae. My sheep were not subjected to such horrors. “They are happy sheep,” one dapper representative told me with a wolfish smile.

Despite its South American origins, the fabric had a heavy British solidity. I crumpled it up in my fist as I had seen Mark and Jan do, and when I let go, the fabric opened like a flower. “21 Micron is the more exclusive fabric,” the mill’s representative told me. “It is breathable, high-twisted yarn; it will not wrinkle.” Unlike most suits, mine would be made of six-ply yarn. The fabric’s weight, exclusivity, sturdiness, and expense came from the fact that there was simply more of it.

“Six-ply is for the brave,” the dapper man assured me, a sentence I did not understand, but cherished nonetheless.

“Your suit will be business luxury,” Mark told me. “You can wear it into the ground.”

I stared into the fabric, which looked as inky blue as the eternity I hope to fall into after I expire, many fathoms deeper than the Baltic Sea by which I was born. Soon, I thought, this magical fabric will cover me from my ankles to my neck. And then, maybe, I will be another person.

The author is confronted with endless amounts of wool at Vitale Barberis Canonico. (Bea De Giacomo for The Atlantic)

The next day, Mark and I traveled west of Milan, past rice fields and solar-power farms and shirtless men yawning on balconies, to a village in the Biella region of Piedmont, where Vitale Barberis Canonico is based. The mill’s waiting room was filled with volumes that had titles such as I Am Dandy, and the magazines Monsieur and The One: Yacht & Design. Yachtless and without a French appellation, I wondered what the hell I was doing there. The executive offices surrounded a lovely Japanese garden, and as we began our tour, the members of a visiting group of fabric buyers from Taiwan, China, and Japan shyly snuck photos of Mark.

First mentioned in documents in 1663, Vitale Barberis Canonico is truly canonical, the oldest fabric mill in Italy. Our tour guides explained that the water in the Biella region has a very low concentration of minerals, making it soft, unlike the harsh water in other parts of Europe. This adds an extra softness to the fabric, much as pizza crust in Naples would be unimaginable without the city’s acqua. I touched a clump of Australian wool, and noted how superior my South American sheep was to its antipodean cousin. The seven steps for making wool fabric were explained: washing, gilling (aligning the wool fibers and removing short strands), spinning, dyeing, warping, weaving, and finishing. Giant machines are dedicated to these tasks, and they run all day, mostly without human intervention. The weaving, in which the weft, the horizontal structure, is inserted into the fabric’s vertical structure, the warp, is conducted in the world’s quietest weaving room. Touching the yarn as it was being spun by a machine was like strumming a gently weeping guitar. I was told that my six-ply yarn was the strongest that Vitale Barberis Canonico produced, and that it had been worsted to eliminate some of its hairiness (Hong Kong readers, rejoice). Finally, this exemplary fabric had been put into a massive machine called the Dolphin 1200, which finishes the fabric and prevents it from shrinking.

The author snuggling with some alarmingly soft wool at the Vitale Barberis Canonico mill (Bea De Giacomo for The Atlantic)

In the mill’s archives, we examined order books dating back to 1846, as well as a photo of King Charles III and his fun-loving wife, the Queen Consort, who both appear to be fans of the brand. I saw an advertisement for my fabric, which featured a drawing of sheep standing on a road, next to a man leaning against a sports car. A sign behind him pointed to the ruta del fin del mundo, “the route to the end of the world.” The tagline read: “21 Micron is the final destination of a long journey in search of a family of cloths of the highest quality that guarantee unparalleled strength and crease resistance.”

Is this it? I thought. Has my long sartorial journey finally come to an end?

Mom Posture

But my journey had only begun.

On the way to Asia, I watched one of Wim Wenders’s latest films, Perfect Days, and was struck with the teariness that often hits at 30,000 feet. The film follows an older toilet cleaner in Tokyo, exulting in the care with which he performs his task, the way he makes his work anything but menial. The toilet cleaner’s devotion reminded me of something Mark had said about how a true craftsman focuses on just one item, asking himself constantly, Is this as good as it can be?

In Hong Kong, Mark brought his obsession with individual crafts to a 100-year-old building off Queen’s Road Central, known as the Pedder Building. On the fifth floor, a 6,000-square-foot space called the Pedder Arcade has a distinctly Wong Kar-wai feel, punctuated by broad arches and spinning overhead fans. The Armoury may be the Pedder Arcade’s flagship store, but it is just one part of a lifestyle hub for the intelligent moneyed class, where you can buy a signed first-edition set of John le Carré’s Karla Trilogy for about $7,000. Mark himself works out of a space called “The Study,” where people feel free to drop in and smoke a cigar—some of the world’s best cigars are sold out of an anteroom, with the more intense aged Cuban variants smelling, according to Mark, “as good as God’s armpit.”

Mark is Malaysian Chinese by heritage, but grew up in London, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles and speaks perfect American English, though he will occasionally break a word like forgotten into two, adding to his charm. He got his bachelor’s degree in economics from Brown and started out in finance. We are similar in that neither of our fathers was perfectly happy with the career we ultimately chose: wordsmithing and clothes selling. In Milan, I had asked Mark how he’d resolved things with his father. “He died,” Mark said.

At the Ascot Chang factory, in Hong Kong, sewers and cutters produce about 45 meticulously made shirts a day. (Leung Man Hei for The Atlantic)

In the island’s oppressive heat, Mark and I strolled over to a neighboring mall, where Ascot Chang, the renowned maker of shirts and suits, has one of its stores. Justin Chang, the grandson of the founder—the family has been making shirts in Hong Kong since 1953—greeted us and pulled out rolls of fabric (the store has more than 7,000 variations).

I was to have four shirts made to complement my suit. Justin and Mark talked over each other as I pawed at the crisp fabrics.

We chose four fabrics for the different shirts: a spread-collar dress shirt made in a fine cotton piqué, a traditional white oxford button-down, a vintage-1970s cotton shirt with blue stripes, and my favorite, a chambray shirt with a button-down collar whose uneven yarn gave it a cool and casual look. I reveled in the by-now familiar, almost therapeutic feel of several men pressing measuring tape against my shoulders, chest, and arms. Because I am a watch aficionado, Mark requested that the diameter of the left cuff be slightly larger to expose my timepieces. The formal shirt must not have a pocket, he said, but the easygoing chambray could have a pocket with a button on it. “What does this button convey?” I asked Mark, trying to master all the rules.

“It conveys, I have a button on my shirt.”

The author visiting Ascot Chang in Hong Kong to select fabric and be fitted for four bespoke shirts (Leung Man Hei for The Atlantic)

One of the shirts had to be rushed for my second fitting with Yamamoto-san in Tokyo in a mere two days. Back at the Pedder Arcade, as I tried on a pair of artisanal-denim jeans, Mark told me that this was a particularly difficult task for Ascot Chang, because of my body’s many quirks. “There’s a large drop to your right shoulder,” Mark said. “It makes it difficult to dial in.”

I also apparently have something called “rounded shoulders,” which results from a forward head position and a forward pelvic tilt. When I looked up my diagnosis online, I discovered that it is also called “mom posture,” a malady that usually afflicts mothers, who have to bend down to take care of their children. I wanted to congratulate myself on my devotion as a parent, but realized that my mom posture must result from a lifetime of slouching my shoulders to hide my breasts and, possibly, from constantly nursing my other child, my phone, while walking.

As I modeled the artisanal denim, Mark and I discovered something else: I have no ass. This is why all my pants fall off me.

“No,” I said, immediately predicting what Mark would prescribe. “I can’t. It’s too Wall Street, the movie.”

“Suspenders,” he said.

The next day, we left the fancy Central district and crossed the bay for the industrial hum of Kowloon East, to see the shirt that was being rushed for our Tokyo departure. In the warm, bright light of the factory, a host of workers was making my chambray shirt. I smiled sheepishly at the men and women toiling overtime to create the special differing armholes that would compensate for my dropped shoulder. Thirty-eight workers at the Ascot Chang factory produce about 45 shirts a day. The cloth cutters are mostly men; the sewers, who do the more complex engineering, such as the cuffs and collars, are mostly women.

The author touring the Ascot Chang factory. The Chang family has been making shirts in Hong Kong since 1953. (Leung Man Hei for The Atlantic)

The next morning, the chambray shirt was ready. I tried on my first-ever bespoke garment with trepidation. In the wooden glow of the Ascot Chang shop, I witnessed my first transformation. This was not the suit, but it was the pre-suit, an exquisite blue thing with gleaming charcoal mother-of-pearl buttons and, as I was told by Mark, “quite a strong collar for someone your size.”

But for the first time in my life, the fit was right. The fit was good. The fit was perfect. Through the industry of a thoughtful team of cutters and sewers on the edge of Asia, I had finally reached a détente with my body. I looked at myself in the mirror and there I was: a well-dressed middle-aged man.

Yamamoto-San Returns

Armed with one Ascot Chang shirt, with three more on the way, we left Hong Kong for Tokyo for the final steps of the bespoke journey—the second fitting with Yamamoto-san and a shoe fitting with Yohei Fukuda, “arguably the best shoe money can buy,” according to Mark.

Tokyo is the city for craftspeople, and I was happy to watch Mark buzz around like a hummingbird, searching for perfect accoutrements for his clients. We visited the Ginza branch of Atelier Jean Rousseau, where men in white lab coats perfected a watch strap for a customer’s Patek Philippe Ellipse. “Do you have a real rose-gold stitch?” Mark asked. “I know they cost a lot of money.”

We cabbed across Ginza to Ortus, a maker of elite bags from materials including hippo, elephant, and seal, where Mark had commissioned a briefcase for an underemployed man of means that contained nothing but a Monopoly set (the Hong Kong–tram edition, naturally, the pieces made in silver). “Does he go around Hong Kong playing Monopoly with his friends?” I asked.

“Well, he’s hoping this will make him some friends,” Mark said.

That evening I had dinner with W. David Marx, the author of the aforementioned Ametora. David is a 6-foot-4 southern WASP-Catholic-Jew hybrid, who also counts Yamamoto-san as a tailor. “It makes you look like an adult,” he told me of the suit I would soon wear. “Which is not what people want to look like anymore.”

The next morning, I climbed the steps to the second floor of Yamamoto-san’s atelier, Tailor Caid, in the hip Shibuya section of Tokyo. Welcome to Caid modern tailoring proclaimed a sign next to a silhouette of a man in a fedora toting a briefcase down an imaginary Madison Avenue. We are not fashion snobs, the sign continued, but we know a few simple rules.

Inside, Yamamoto-san was resplendent in another seersucker suit, this one light blue, a dark-blue pocket square providing contrast. A record player was spinning not just Ella Fitzgerald, but a rare Japanese edition of her work titled Ella and Nice Guys. A Harvard pennant hung in the bathroom. There were old, yellowing copies of the Japanese magazines that had made Ivy style synonymous with Japan, with titles such as Popeye and Hot-Dog Press and headlines including “We Are Real IVY Leaguers.” And, finally, I was confronted with the work in progress, draped over a wooden hanger: my midnight-blue suit held together with white basting thread.

I relieved myself beneath the Harvard pennant and, with shaking hands, put on the suit. At this stage in the bespoke process, the basting thread disfigured the jacket, dividing it into quadrants, and the buttons were nothing but stickers. But I could begin to imagine the wonder that the suit would become. The heavy six-ply fabric felt primordially satisfying, like a light suit of armor, but one that managed to cling to my body with near perfection. This second fitting would remove the near.

“There is an extended shoulder, but no pad,” Yamamoto-san explained through a translator, negating the horrors of the shoulder-pad-stricken ’80s, but also managing to support my dropped right shoulder. “There is an empty space in the chest,” Yamamoto-san pointed out. Because I stoop so profoundly, he had used the draping technique to, in Mark’s words, “give your chest a little more volume.” The jacket cleverly made my chimichangas all but invisible, while ironically providing them with new space to roam.

“Damn, this is dramatic,” the usually unflappable Mark said.

“The way you wear this,” Yamamoto-san said, “it looks like ’50s France, or Alain Delon in the ’60s.”

We talked about areas that needed improvement. I lifted my arms and turned around. “What do we do with Gary’s behind?” Mark asked as the two men searched for my ass. “Apparently you lost some butt since the first fitting.”

“He should wear his pants as snug as possible,” Yamamoto-san said. The dreaded word suspenders came up again. “When the pants are above the belly button, everything is in line.”

“He could do some squats,” Mark said, an opinion I would not dignify with a response.

We chose a beautiful turquoise lining to contrast with the outer sobriety of the suit, and also navy buttons made out of nuts. “Into each life, some rain must fall,” Ella crooned on the record player, but I was hardly listening to her.

The author with Mark Cho, the owner of the Armoury ( left), and Yamamoto-san (middle), enjoying a drink at Martiny’s bar, in New York City (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

To celebrate the suit, we retired to the tailor’s favorite bar, Le Zinc, a few minutes’ walk from his atelier. Yamamoto-san is the type of Japanese man who surrounds himself with so much perfection that it would be interesting to take him someplace awful, like Hudson Yards or Westfield Garden State Plaza. Le Zinc felt like it had floated in from a former America, too spare and beautiful to provoke nostalgia, only awe. My martini was so excellent, I struggled not to cry. “There’s a sentiment in Japan,” my tailor said. “We don’t want to come to a bar without being well-dressed. There is a sentimentalization of Western culture.”

“A Western culture that barely exists,” I said.

A few martinis and highballs into our celebration, Yamamoto-san began to talk at length. He’d idolized America since he was a child. He listened to jazz in elementary school and saw the men wearing suits, and he couldn’t wait to wear a suit as well. He fell in love with the show Bewitched, in which an ad executive named Darrin (originally played by Dick York) was married to a witch named Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery)—but more important for Yamamoto-san, Darrin worked on Madison Avenue and wore fabulous suits.

I have to pause this story for a minute. Back in Queens, when I was wearing my Robin the Boy Wonder T-shirts and watching television on my grandmother’s failing 1960s Zenith set, Bewitched had managed to bewitch me as well. My nearly pubescent eyes lightly male-gazed Samantha, but I was equally in love with Darrin and his stark but perfect suits and ties. Though separated by a continent and an ocean, the young Yamamoto-san and I had entertained the same ideas of male fashion.

“A lot of young people today are anti-aging,” he continued. “They want their clothes to show their youth. I like the idea of aging, the kind of aging you see in vintage furniture or a vintage watch. Aging is beautiful. When I see a 70-year-old man in Manhattan picking up after a dog while wearing a suit, I applaud.”

We continued our discussion over bottles of Barolo at his favorite restaurant, which featured Lucchese cuisine. I had been to the actual Lucca just a month earlier, but the Japanese version of the food, like my Ivy-style suit in progress, seemed to both canonize and elevate its inspiration. If this part reads like a love letter to Japan and its pasta makers and toilet cleaners, I assure you it is.

According to ancient Japanese custom, a night of karaoke followed, about which I recall only singing Suzanne Vega’s child-abuse classic “Luka,” to which my audience nodded politely. In the middle of the night, I tripped over the complicated stairs of my hotel suite and almost broke my nose. But I felt fine.

The Final Touch

The next day would see the last piece of my wardrobe fall into place. The back-order list for Yohei Fukuda’s shoes is so long, the atelier has stopped accepting bespoke-shoe orders from new clients. For the time being, it is near-impossible to get his shoes, so please allow me to enjoy mine by myself. Fukuda-san and his assistants make only eight pairs a month, and each takes 130 to 140 hours of work. The soles are stitched by hand, which makes them a lot more flexible. Much like Yamamoto-san, who interned with a Boston tailor, Fukuda-san attended two years of “shoe college” in Northamptonshire, England, and then worked his way up from repairing soles to creating leather masterpieces in his atelier, by Tokyo’s Olympic stadium.

Fukuda-san is perfectly bald, with a luxuriant mustache. His work has been described as “kind of British,” which means he references and perfects traditional British shoes with the same brio as my tailor’s approach to Ivy style. The British did fine; Yohei Fukuda does better.

The atelier of the shoemaker Yohei Fukuda, in Tokyo (An Rong Xu for The Atlantic)

Mark has this theory that bespoke oxfords are not really worth the money, because many fine examples can be found off the rack. But he believes in bespoke loafers. So now is the time to confess another of my body’s deficiencies: One of my legs happens to be longer than the other. Since I was a child, I’ve had to wear inserts in my shoes to account for this discrepancy, and so an easygoing loafer, the pride of America’s aristocratic New England class, is sadly not for me.

We surveyed the gleaming shoes arrayed along the length of Fukuda-san’s atelier, like icons in a church. “Derby shoes,” Mark suggested. I looked over a couple. They were not quite as formal as oxfords, nor as floppy as loafers. Unlike oxfords, they had an open-laced construction that would comfort my calloused piggies during my daily six-mile walks around the countryside.

My final row of samples to examine was rolled out, a collection of hides that would allow us to choose a color. “For derbies, the best place to start is the darkest brown,” Mark suggested. I remembered Boyer writing in True Style about how the Italians had taught the world not to be afraid of mixing brown shoes with blue suits.

“Coffee,” Fukuda-san suggested, as we flipped through the hides.

“Maroon,” Mark offered.

“Brown pepper!” I said, as I ran my hands across a suede that seemed spicier, more intense, more brown than the others. Fukuda-san measured and traced every part of my foot, as we discussed adding a big rubber heel for better traction, and a steel toe. As with Yamamoto-san’s suit, my comfort and pleasure would be the biggest factors here; there would be no room for ostentation. No one must know that these shoes cost $3,000, I thought. No one.

My derbies would be lined with forest green to remind me of the forests behind my dacha. “Would you like your shoes monogrammed?” Fukuda-san asked. I was tempted to allow this to happen, but my Oberlin education still had some sway. My shoes remain anonymous.

Yamamoto-San 3: The Transformation

Just over two months later, Yamamoto-san arrived back in New York with my suit. My shoes had emigrated through different channels.

It was November 7, two days after an important American election. I was trying to practice self-care. I couldn’t make my adopted country fall out of love with fascism, but at least I could enjoy my new shoes. Also, I suspected that our new leader would cut my taxes as he had in the past, shuffling money from his supporters into my piggy bank. As an immigrant who had moved from one failed superpower to another, I had learned to take my pleasures wherever I could.

Mark educates the author on how to tie an Old Bertie knot during his final fitting at the Armoury. (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

On the night of my suit’s unveiling, Mark threw yet another party at the Armoury’s Upper East Side location. The evening was warm, almost summery. Before I was ready to put on my suit, Yamamoto-san showed me how to steam-iron it with his beloved Panasonic travel iron. The Yohei Fukuda shoes were presented to me in a beautiful blond-wood box. “There’s no nail in that box,” one of the Armoury’s salesmen said. “Like a Jewish coffin.”

But as I put on the suit, I felt less Jewish than distinctly Christian, Episcopalian if not Calvinist; in any case, born again. I walked out of the changing room and looked into a mirror. I was contained by midnight blue, my shoulders weighed down with six-ply pleasure, each of my feet covered by what felt like the product of a heavily personalized cow.

“Yokatta! ” Yamamoto-san cried—roughly, “Thank goodness!”

“Yokatta,” Mark said, smiling.

The author stroking the iridescent lining of his suit during his final fitting (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

While I stood there yammering my gratitude, I noticed that despite the tailor’s best efforts, my pants were still sliding off the ghost of my ass. “I also have no tuchus,” the Armoury salesman who’d likened my shoebox to a Jewish coffin explained. “There’s no shelf on our bodies.”

To compensate, I was strapped into a pair of suspenders, and Mark lovingly tied a polka-dot tie around my neck in an Old Bertie knot. Even though I was at least a decade older than he was, I had started to think of Mark as my parent. He demonstrated how using a Bertie knot instead of the usual four-in-hand would benefit a shorter man like me by ending my tie at the waist, not the groin, where our returning president likes his. He thrust his index finger below the knot of my tie and explained that he was making a dimple.

“Braces and polka dots, matching, wow!” Yamamoto-san said in English. He motioned to my nearly transparent Selima Optique frames. “And with glasses color, very nice!”

We’d had many discussions about whether my pants would come with buttons instead of a zipper, to avoid the dreaded “pants tent.” But after I had demonstrated to him my love of martinis and the many bathroom visits they inspire, Yamamoto-san had relented with a zipper.

I left the fitting room and walked out into the crucible of menswear society. Although my suit felt Episcopalian, men gathered around me as if I were a bar mitzvah at the bimah. They touched the fabric; they touched my shoulders; they touched my arms and my collar. They followed me out into the Armoury’s well-lit backyard.

“It looks like it was painted on you,” one man said.

“The back is so clean.”

“Your shoulders slope, and this just hugs them.”

“The neck hugs the collar with no wrinkle.”

“The stitching adds texture and visual interest.”

“The weight helps it hang, the drape.”

“That’s a good lapel length.”

“You’re shaming us all tonight.”

The author strolling through New York with his newfound self-esteem (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

I opened up my suit, shyly and then proudly, to let folks touch the iridescent lining within. Is this what it was like to be loved in this country? Yamamoto-san took me aside and told me that I must wear my suit all the time, and wear it casually, not just for special occasions. The suit was a part of me now. “What we have to divine is: What is a Gary Shteyngart suit?” Mark had once asked. Well, now we had divined it.

“If this becomes just for special occasions, I haven’t done my job,” Yamamoto-san said.

I promised him that I would never abandon the suit. Every week, I would find a use for it.

And I have kept my promise. I wear my suit regularly and with joy. I can do the Bertie knot in my sleep now. The different Ascot Chang shirts combine with either the polka-dot tie or its less formal counterpart, a silk foulard tie, to create different personalities. “You look like a crooner from the ’50s,” my wife, Esther, said of one combination. “You look like an English deacon,” she said of another.

“Bitch! You’re ready for anything now!” Shilpa wrote from Tuscany.

“I feel like you’re walking differently than you usually do,” my friend Sarah remarked. “You’re strutting a little.”

Only my 11-year-old son, Johnny, was unimpressed. “I wear a less comfortable version of that every single day,” he told me, pulling at the collar of his school uniform.

I began to wear my suit to all my meals and to take it into consideration when I ordered. What would my suit like to eat? I would ask. The suit wanted shrimp cocktail. Even after the noon hour, the suit wanted steak and eggs with Tabasco sauce and a Bloody Mary. I traveled with my suit to give a reading at the University of Pennsylvania. The suit was a perfect companion. It sprang out of my suitcase like a golden retriever, with not even the afterthought of a crease on it.

My head floating above the perfect triangle effectuated by my lapels, I gave one of the best readings of my life. Why shouldn’t I? I had always been content with my mind, but now I loved my body. It was no longer an object of discomfort and derision. I loved the small flickering muscles beneath my chest. I loved the roundness of my posture, my settled state. Like a character out of a James Salter novel, I loved my physique, my physicality. And I loved myself.

We did a photo shoot at Martiny’s, a Japanese-style cocktail bar on 17th Street. Yamamoto-san insisted that he would help supervise. He parted the tie for me as I lay on a couch to make me look more at ease, more Ivy style. He made sure that only half of the watch I had chosen for the shoot, a gilt-dial 1963 Rolex Explorer, would flash from beneath my cuff.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Afterward, Mark and I were walking through Tribeca past an immensely popular French bistro. It was the weekend, a prime dining hour; the place looked packed.

“Let’s get a table,” Mark said.

“Are you kidding?” I said. I mentioned several other restaurants down the street that might prove a better bet.

“Just go in and try,” Mark said. “I have to make a phone call.”

I approached the beautiful maître d’ alone, but instead of the usual sniveling noises I make in these situations, the excuses for not making a reservation, my understanding that I might have to wait for an hour or more for a table to open up, I stated forthrightly that my friend and I were in need of immediate sustenance.

A microsecond passed among myself, the maître d’, and my suit. A brief nod was issued. “Would you like the dining room or the bar?” she asked.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Behold My Suit!” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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There are two Chicago neighborhoods that are, on the surface, quite similar. They are both more than 90 percent Black; the median age of both is roughly 38. About the same share of people have college degrees, and the median income of both is roughly $39,000.

But one experiences about twice as many shootings per capita as the other.

The University of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig opens his forthcoming book, Unforgiving Places, by describing the neighboring places of Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore, both minutes away from the elite university where he teaches. Ludwig’s argument begins by reframing the problem of gun violence away from the demoralizing story of American exceptionalism and toward the more granular variation that differs state by state, city by city, and yes, block by block.

“Whatever you believe about the causes of gun violence in America, those beliefs almost surely fail to explain why Greater Grand Crossing would be so much more of a violent place than South Shore,” Ludwig writes. “How, in a city and a country where guns are everywhere, does gun violence occur so unevenly—even across such short distances, in this case literally right across the street?”

Talking about gun crime almost always turns into talking about gun-control legislation, a debate that has been happening my entire life and I’m sure will continue past my death. But on today’s episode of Good on Paper, Ludwig and I spend little time on that topic, focusing instead on policy levers that could reduce gun violence but don’t require national gun-control legislation.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: In 2022, Louisiana had the second-highest rate of gun deaths in the country. I’m just back from a reporting trip to the Lake Charles area, and I had a few people remark rather pointedly to me that my home of Washington, D.C., is a violent place, seemingly unaware that D.C. has had a significantly lower rate of gun deaths than Louisiana for many years now.

Why do some places see higher rates of gun violence than others? It’s an incredibly important question to answer rigorously. Homicide is a leading cause of death for young adults, and the vast majority of those homicides happen with guns. But this is a topic where the politics rarely line up with actionable solutions.

After the COVID-19 crime wave, politicians have scrambled as they place crime at the top of the agenda again and are searching for public-policy tools to address violence in their communities.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at the Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My guest today is the economist Jens Ludwig, from the University of Chicago, who has spent his career studying the economics of crime. He has a book coming out in a few months called Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of Gun Violence.

Jens and I talk about the classic explanations for why gun violence happens in some places and not others. He pushes back against the classic right-wing explanation that the problem is bad people and the classic left-wing argument that solving the problem of gun violence requires ending mass social inequalities first.

One note about the show: We’re going to begin adding the studies and articles and books we reference in the show notes, so you can easily access them for further reading. A link to Jens’ book will be there, too, if you’d like to investigate his argument further.

Okay. Jens, welcome to the show.

[Music]

Jens Ludwig: Thanks so much for having me. It’s such an honor to be here.

Demsas: Jens, you have a book coming out in April called Unforgiving Places. What’s it about? What are you arguing?

Ludwig: The book basically makes two arguments. One argument is that we’re despairing about the problem of gun violence because we’ve thought about it as just all being about gun control, and I think that’s not true. I think the problem of gun violence in America is partly about guns, and it’s partly about violent behavior. And if we can’t do anything about the guns, we can at least try and do something about the violent behavior. And the experiences of L.A. and New York over the last 30 years show us that there’s real progress that you can make there.

And then I think the other core argument of the book is that violent behavior is not what we’ve thought. I think most people have thought of violent behavior in America as being about thoughtful, deliberate action that leads you to focus on incentives, like bigger sticks or more enticing carrots. And in fact, I think most shootings in America are instead fast-thinking, reactive—it stems from arguments. And that leads us away from relying exclusively on incentives and towards a very different type of policy that we just haven’t been talking about or thinking about.

Demsas: When I was reading your book, there was a stat that just has been rattling around in my brain since I read it. You write that shootings account for fewer than 1 percent of all crimes but nearly 70 percent of the total social harm of crime. What does that mean? And how is that even measured?

Ludwig: Yeah. So the way that economists think about that sort of thing is very analogous to how environmental economists think about environmental harm. If you go back to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska a million years ago, there’s the tangible cost of cleaning up the bay or whatever it is, and then there’s the sort of social costs that don’t show up on any sort of budget spreadsheet anywhere. That’s the “harm to this pristine place now being ruined forever” kind of thing.

And so environmental economists have come up with ways of quantifying those sorts of intangible costs. And we can use the same sort of approach to measure the harm for crime as well. It basically comes down to what people are willing to pay to avoid exposure to different types of crime.

And so what you can see is people really don’t like disorder. They really don’t like having their bicycle stolen, their car stolen. I lived in cities for the last 30 years. I’ve had almost every sort of property crime that you can imagine happen to me. But the thing that people really, really are petrified about is staring down the barrel of a gun. And I can tell you that from firsthand experience. I was held up at gunpoint myself on the South Side of Chicago, going to pick up my older daughter from her piano lesson about five years ago.

My University of Chicago colleague Steve Levitt did a study where he showed that every serious crime that happens in a city reduces the city’s population on net by one person—so fewer people moving in, more people moving out. Every murder that happens in a city—the overwhelming majority of murders in the United States, unfortunately, are committed with guns—every murder that happens in a city reduces the city’s population by 70 people. And I think that’s another way to sort of see exactly how much the gun-violence problem in America is driving the crime problem.

Demsas: I also think it’s just remarkable to really think about this in perspective of how much effort we spend in trying to eliminate certain types of crime. I mean, if 70 percent of total social harm is shootings, then the vast majority of our efforts should just be focused on guns. And property crime should take a backseat, all this sort of thing. Intuitively, we understand that, obviously, murder is worse than other forms of crime, but I think the degree to which that is driving America’s violence problem and crime problem and the harms that ricochet out into communities is, I think, not well understood.

Ludwig: Yeah, I one million percent agree. And I think it also sort of helps you see a path to a criminal-justice system, a law-enforcement system that kind of sidesteps a lot of the current political fights that we’re having. I think everybody agrees that gun violence is a hugely serious problem, that we should be holding people accountable for this.

Even the mayor of Chicago, who I think within the political distribution is one of the more progressive elected leaders in the United States—he’s going around talking about the need to improve the odds that shooters get arrested and wind up behind bars. And so I think this much stronger focus on gun violence would be a way to concentrate everything on the thing that the American public really cares the most about. It sidesteps a lot of the fraught political debates about how we do enforcement over lots of other things that the public doesn’t like, but it’s not the first-order thing that they’re worried about.

Demsas: So there’s familiar pattern that I think most people are aware of when it comes to the gun-policy conversation in the United States, and it’s: There is a tragic mass shooting—maybe at a school, maybe at a nightclub—and then there’s this intense rallying to pass gun legislation.

And economists have quantified this. There’s a study that showed that a mass shooting leads to a 15 percent increase in the number of firearm bills introduced within a state the year following that shooting. Interestingly, in states with Republican-controlled legislatures, those are often laws that loosen gun restrictions. But even when looking at Democrat-controlled legislatures and laws that tighten gun restrictions, studies often struggle to find significant impact of these laws on reducing gun violence, reducing deaths, reducing mass shootings.

In your book, you also seem kind of pessimistic about the potential for gun legislation to have a large impact on reducing gun deaths. Why is that?

Ludwig: Yeah. Let me respond in two ways. The first is: Federal gun laws set a floor, not a ceiling, on what cities and states can do. And so lots of cities and states around the country, including my home city of Chicago, have enacted gun laws that are more restrictive than what you have under the national law. And the problem with that is that we live in a country with open city and state borders. So what Gary, Indiana, is doing about air quality affects the South Side of Chicago, and vice versa, right?

And in the same way, like, my family for the last 18 years has lived in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago. Our favorite ice-cream place in the area is Dairy Belle in Hammond, Indiana. So we spend 20 minutes driving down there every summer, like, way too often. And when we come back from Indiana into Chicago, nobody stops us at the city border to check what we have in our trunk.

And when you look at where the crime guns are coming from in Chicago, almost none of them come from a gun store in Chicago. They come from places like, you know—there are gun stores quite close to Dairy Belle in Indiana that are big sources of crime guns in the city. So I think the way that you want to be thinking about gun regulation, I think, is very analogous to how you would do something like regulate air quality. And that’s to think about regulation at the national level in a world in which you’ve got what an economist would call lots of externalities across jurisdictions in their own laws.

Demsas: But even federal gun-control legislation has often felt, at least from my overview of the economics literature, like it hasn’t had a massive impact, whether it’s assault-weapons legislation or other forms of gun-control legislation that’s passed over the past few decades. Is that just a reflection of the fact that these laws are pretty modest in what they’re attempting to do? Or does that indicate that we can’t really attack this problem legislatively?

Ludwig: What I would say is: Most of the national gun laws that we’ve enacted in the United States are very modest, as you said. I think the biggest problem with the gun laws that we have in the United States is: Most of the laws regulating gun acquisition—you know, gun sales—only apply to gun sales that are, basically, carried out by a licensed gun dealer.

And that’s something like 50 or 60 percent of all gun sales in the U.S. And the other 40 percent are almost completely unregulated under federal law. Some states try and regulate that, but that’s not a loophole—that’s like a chasm that you can drive a truck through. And you know, when you look at where the guns used in crime come from, you wouldn’t be surprised to see that’s the most important source of crime guns that you see in Chicago and other cities around the country.

But you know, I think the difficulty of cities and states regulating their way out of the gun-violence problem, and the difficulty of substantially changing national gun laws, has led a lot of people to conclude that gun violence in America is a hopeless problem, because we can see that the gun-control politics are stuck.

So one way that I’ve come to think about this is that that’s too pessimistic a view. And the reason for that is that gun violence is not just about guns; it’s about guns plus violence. So it’s having lots of guns around, but also having people who use them to hurt other people. And if we can’t make much progress on the gun-access part of things, the good news is that there’s a second path to progress, which is to try and change the willingness of people to use guns to hurt other people.

We have something like 400 million guns in the United States, in a country of about 330 million people. And I think the existence proof that shows us that you really can make a huge difference on the gun-violence problem by figuring out how to control violence comes from the Los Angeles and New York City experience over the last 30 years.

So in 1991, the murder rate per 100,000 people in L.A. and New York was very similar to Chicago, actually, at that time. It was something like 30 per 100,000. So to give you a sense of what that means: In London, the murder rate is something like one or two per 100,000. So the United States is just totally off the charts. Almost all of those extra murders here are committed with firearms.

And in the 30-year period following that—so 1991 (the peak of the crack-cocaine epidemic), 30 years after that, up through 2019 (the last year before the pandemic)—the murder rate in Los Angeles declined by 80 percent; the murder rate in New York City declined by 90 percent. And those are cities that are swimming in the ocean of, you know, hundreds of millions of guns in America. And I think that speaks to a more optimistic take, that it is not a hopeless problem—not just that something can be done but that something substantial can be done.

Demsas: The other variation you point to in your book that is what really intrigued me is that Canada and Switzerland also have above-average rates of gun ownership, but they don’t have particularly high rates of murder in line with what we would expect if you just took America’s experience. And I think I had this kind of model in my head that it’s just like, If you have this many guns, there’s nothing you can do. Like, that’s the situation. There will be variations based on other things, like whether the economy is doing well or whether we’re incarcerating people or not, or how many cops there are on the street and what they’re doing. You’d still see variations in crime, but you would always have some kind of baseline level of criminality.

But I want to get to the core argument of your book, which I think is maybe encapsulated by a pretty provocative question on the back cover, which says, “What if everything we understood about gun violence was wrong?” This is a very bold claim, and I’m excited to explore it with you. But I think that the first part of that is unpacking what it is that you mean by “everything we understand about gun violence.” You lay out two competing theories that Americans hold about the causes of gun violence. One is the “root causes theory” and one is the “wickedness theory.” Can you just walk us through what those two are?

Ludwig: Yeah, the conventional wisdom in America right now says that violent behavior is thought through, right? So it’s either bad people who aren’t afraid of whatever the criminal-justice system is going to do to them, or it’s people in bad economic conditions who are desperate in doing whatever they need to do to survive. And both of those conventional wisdoms on the right and the left actually have something in common, which is: They think of gun violence as being sort of a deliberate behavior, and that leads us then to focus on incentives to solve the problem. You know, We need bigger sticks, if you’re on one side of the aisle, or if you’re on the other side of the aisle, We need more enticing carrots.

I think the thing that’s so striking is that it just doesn’t fit with what all of the data tell us gun violence in the United States is. Most shootings are not premeditated, and most shootings are not motivated by economic considerations. They’re not robbery. They’re not drug-selling turf. That’s all what psychologists would call “System 2” slow thinking.

Most shootings, instead, stem from arguments. They’re reactive, or what psychologists would call “System 1” thinking. And the fact that so many shootings stem from these sorts of in-the-moment conflicts that go sideways and end in a tragedy because someone’s got a gun, that helps explain why deterrence is imperfect. Someone acting very reactively is not thinking through a jail sentence. And it also helps explain why a social program that’s intended to reduce poverty—like give somebody a job, give somebody cash, whatever—that also isn’t solving the violence problem.

Demsas: I want to hold here a bit because I think this question, Are people making rational calculations? is both at the heart of a lot of economics and also the heart of what we’re going to talk about for the rest of this episode. And I accept that I do not think that I or anyone else is constantly doing a benefit-cost analysis about every action that I take, even if it is as important as whether you pull out a gun and shoot someone.

But I wonder whether that undersells the rationality that still exists, right? Because we know that deterrence is possible. We know that when we increase the certainty of capture—if you know you’re going to get caught for shoplifting, if you know that you’re going to go to jail if you shoot someone—that significantly decreases crime incidents. And what that indicates to me is that there is a level of benefit-cost analysis happening, even if people aren’t fully using that System 2 part of their brain.

Ludwig: Yeah, I one hundred percent agree that deterrence is really a thing. I’m a card-carrying economist. I work at the University of Chicago. I totally believe that incentives matter and that deterrence is a thing. But I think that this really connects very importantly to where we started, that gun violence is the part of the crime problem that is the thing that drives the total social cost of crime.

So in many ways, crime is an unhelpfully broad term. It’s almost like disease. What would you do about disease? I mean, I don’t even know how to think about answering that. Like What are we talking about? Like, pneumonia or cancer? And crime is a similarly unhelpful, super-broad umbrella.

And there was a study, for instance, done in Sweden a few years ago where they looked at what happened when you put cameras up in the subway system. And what you could see is that property crimes go down when you camera-up the trains, but violent crime doesn’t go down, right? And I think what that tells you, partly, is that different behaviors are shaped differently.

The key breakthrough of behavioral economics and behavioral science over the last couple of decades is to realize that our minds work in two different sorts of ways. There’s the deliberate, sort of rational benefit-cost calculation that psychologists call System 2, and a sort of very reactive, automatic, below-the-level-of-consciousness cognition that psychologists call System 1—or fast thinking and slow thinking.

And different behaviors are driven by different types of cognition. And so stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family is much more System 2 than what you do in an argument. Let me just point the finger at myself, first and foremost here. I’m not saying anything about other people’s behavior that is not true of my own behavior.

I’ve lived for 18 years in Hyde Park. It’s a little University of Chicago village in the middle of the South Side of Chicago. Every Wednesday morning, I take my dog, Aiko, out for a little walk. One day, I’m walking down the street, and about three or four doors down from me, there’s a neighbor whose dog is off leash, runs down the driveway, and attacks my dog.

Demas: Oh God. I hate that.

Ludwig: No, exactly. And this guy, the neighbor—his kids are literally in the same classroom as mine at the lab school. He lives four doors down from me. I have every incentive in the world to handle that gracefully and constructively. And that’s exactly what System 2 rational thinking would have done.

It turns out: That is exactly not what I did in that case. I assume this is a podcast where people don’t curse, but you can only imagine the stream of four-letter, seven-letter, and twelve-letter words that came out of my mouth at this guy who I’m going to be seeing for years into the future. I’m going to be seeing him at the parent potluck at school.

And so it really speaks to this idea of: In these super high-stakes moments, where people just don’t have very much bandwidth and they are relying on sort of very fast thinking to navigate, we are not always our best selves. We are not thinking about benefits and costs and things off into the future. We can make mistakes. All of us can make mistakes.

And in my case in Hyde Park, I was very lucky that neither one of us had a gun. But in a country with 400 million guns, you know, lots of people are in situations like that and behave the way I did and, unfortunately, they or the other person’s got a gun, and it ends in tragedy. And those tragedies, really, I would just point out, claim two lives. Somebody does something stupid in a moment and, you know, you spend the rest of your life in prison, and somebody else winds up dead. It’s multiple tragedies stemming from that.

Demsas: First, is your dog okay? Was everything fine?

Ludwig: Yeah, she’s a big chicken. She’s, like, a 70-pound shepherd mix who decided, rather than to try and defend herself or whatever, she would—I don’t want to throw my dog under the bus here. Everything turned out fine. She’s a lover, not a fighter. (Laughs.)

Demsas: (Laughs.) Your dog also is in System 1 thinking.

Ludwig: Yeah, exactly.

Demsas: Well, first, we’ll shout out the late Danny Kahneman here and his Thinking, Fast and Slow book, which provides much of the foundation of the System 1, System 2 model that you’re talking about here.

But I want to push here a bit because I think one of the common objections people have to this line of argument is that, yes, it is the case that, whether someone’s coming at you or you’re worried about your dog, and you don’t react the in the way that you might if you used your logical brain to react if you had time to think—but given that if you place every single American in the exact same conditions, you still see large variations in how people choose to respond, right? Like, all the people who are in conflicts in the South Side of Chicago do not shoot each other. A very small minority of people are choosing to shoot each other, even if they have access to a gun.

And so doesn’t that push against this idea that the problem is this System 1 thinking? Like, there is something particular about the choice to pull out a gun and kill someone in that moment. And it’s not just, Well, anyone can make that mistake, because even if you think about this demographically, we’re seeing mostly young men make this mistake and make this choice. There is something going on here that is not just, You’re not able to think under stress.

Ludwig: Let me take your question and sort of turn it on its head for a second. One of the things that I point out in the book is like a version of an observation that Jane Jacobs made 60 years ago in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which is: When you look at similarly poor neighborhoods in American cities, you see huge variation in crime rates, especially violent crime.

And as I mentioned, I lived for a long time in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago. There are two neighborhoods just south of Hyde Park. There’s Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore that are socio-demographically, historically almost identical in terms of their racial and ethnic composition, their socioeconomic composition. They’re adjacent neighborhoods, so they’ve got exactly the same gun laws; they’ve got exactly the same social policies. When people get caught, they get sent to exactly the same court system. So all the incentives that conventional wisdom would say would matter are identical. And yet the shooting rate per 100,000 is, in most years, about twice as high in Greater Grand Crossing than literally across Dorchester Avenue in South Shore.

Demsas: Wow.

Ludwig: So that’s sort of taking the premise of your question and noting that the incentive explanation certainly doesn’t explain all of the variation that you see in gun violence either.

So what could it be then? I one million percent agree with you that—at its core, the argument here is: People are people, and a lot of what determines the outcome of this interpersonal conflict is the situation that someone finds themselves in. But if it’s not socioeconomics, and it’s not the characteristics of the criminal-justice system, what else would it be?

And I think in many ways, Jane Jacobs was really onto something 60 years ago in thinking about what that thing would be. To sort of connect an experience that I had in Chicago a couple years ago to Jane Jacobs’ insight, I was in the juvenile-detention center on the West Side of Chicago, I’m talking to a staff leader there, and he says, I tell all the kids in here, “If I could give you back just 10 minutes of your lives, none of you would be here.”

And one of the insights that Jane Jacobs had 60 years ago is: If the problem here is people do things in these 10-minute windows that they later regret, you could almost sort of think of fraught social interactions as like a high-wire act. And one of the ways that you can help people is by—what do they do in the circus for high-wire performers? They have a safety net there.

And one of the safety nets that you have much more of in some neighborhoods than others is essentially what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street”—prosocial adults who are around and able to step in and deconflict things when it happens. And you could see exactly that when you look at South Shore versus Greater Grand Crossing.

So there is, for instance, much more commercial development in South Shore than in Greater Grand Crossing. And what that means, in practice, is that there’s just lots more foot traffic in the community in South Shore than Greater Grand Crossing. And so if a group of teenagers is getting into an argument, there’s more likely to be, like, a neighborhood adult around to step in.

It’s also the case—so my friends Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir have a wonderful book that came out a couple of years ago, called Scarcity, where they point out that one of the many challenges of being poor in the United States is living in day-to-day circumstances that tax mental bandwidth. It’s just very stressful, right? And people with limited bandwidth wind up relying much more on System 1 than people who are less bandwidth taxed.

So when you look at the data, you can see all sorts of indicators that there’s much more stress and bandwidth tax for people living in Greater Grand Crossing than South Shore. And what that would lead you to conclude is that the people who are in Greater Grand Crossing are going to be more likely when they’re in these difficult, 10-minute, fraught interactions with somebody else to rely on System 1 to navigate that than their more deliberate, rational benefit-cost-calculating selves.

So I think the sort of left-of-center perspective that there are root causes that matter is definitely right. I think it’s totally right for property crime—you know, crimes shaped by economic considerations. I think it’s just a little bit incomplete with respect to the part of the crime problem that the public cares the most about, which is gun violence. And so I think we just need to expand our lens about what aspects of the social environment we want to be prioritizing for our public policies.

Demsas: I’m a housing person, so I’m a big fan of the Jane Jacobs book and the argument that she kind of draws out, and I think people can imagine this if they’ve been in streets and communities like this before, is when you have kind of mixed-use development—you have a coffee shop, and above that coffee shop, you have apartments, and across the street, there’s also a park, and there’s also a school nearby—is that that means that throughout the day, there are many different kinds of people watching the streets.

Versus if you had just a fully residential area, and then during the day, everyone’s basically gone because they’re either at school or work, so it really empties out of people to watch things. Or if you have a fully industrial area, where when people go home for the day, there’s nobody there. Or commercial area, same thing. And so when you have these kinds of mixed-use-development areas, it feels a lot safer because you can just always feel like there’s someone around doing normal business or taking their kids to school or whatever.

So I would love for housing policy to be the key. But is your argument, then, that the differences between neighborhoods that have similar socioeconomic problems, similar legal environments, etcetera but a large variation in gun violence is largely a function of their urban form?

Ludwig: I just—I absolutely adore that this is a sort of empirical, data-intensive, data-nerd podcast, and so in that spirit, I do think one of the big challenges for making progress on the sort of the crime and criminal-justice problem is: A lot of it is editorializing rather than guided by data. And so I think one of the key things that I tried to do in the book is really stick to the data and see what the data are telling us.

And so does the built environment matter? There was a wonderful study by Mireille Jacobson and Tom Chang that looks at what happens in Los Angeles when marijuana dispensaries open or close as a result of some regulatory change and when food places open and close.

That’s like the natural experiment of Jane Jacobs, like, let’s put in more mixed use—and what you can see is that when a retail establishment closes and foot traffic goes down, crime goes up.

There was a wonderful study by a great team at the University of Pennsylvania that worked with the City of Philadelphia to do a randomized experiment where they picked a bunch of rundown, vacant lots all over the city and picked half of them to redevelop and turn into little pocket parks. And what you can see is that the pocket parks then wind up bringing more people out of their homes and spending time there in public. And you can see that people feel safer, and they are safer. Gun violence goes down as a result of that.

My research center, the University of Chicago Crime Lab, we did a randomized trial with the City of New York a couple years ago where we helped put increased street lighting in some public-housing developments and not others. And one of the things that that would do is also potentially get more people out in public. We see violence decline there as well.

And then one other thing that I would just add—actually, two other quick things that I would add to this is: I think it gives you another way to understand all of the research and economics that suggests more police reduce crime. I know you had Jen Doleac on recently; you guys were talking about this.

I think most people would say, Oh that’s, like, deterrence or incapacitation. But when I look at the Chicago Police Department, for instance, the average Chicago cop makes about three arrests—not per week, not per month—per year. Three arrests per year.

Demsas: Wow.

Ludwig: So it’s, like, not a gigantic arrest machine that is generating all of this massive deterrence. What are police doing? Well, one of the things that they might be doing is helping interrupt these 10-minute windows. It’s something preventive, right? And I think that is a potentially important part of it.

And the thing that I would add to this, as well, is that sociologists believe that one of the most important determinants of a neighborhood’s violent-crime rate is what they call “collective efficacy”—this is research from the 1990s—the willingness of neighborhood residents to sort of step in and do something when there’s some sort of problem in the neighborhood. And I think that also is very consistent with this kind of behavioral-economics view of the gun-violence problem and what to do about it.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: the problem with focusing on the “root causes” of gun violence.

[Break]

Demsas: Someone listening to this will say, How is this different from the root causes analysis that you kind of critiqued? Right?

Because there’s a really great quote that you have in your book, which is that we “treat gun violence as something that will get better once we fix everything else that’s wrong with society.” And I think that’s a frustration that a lot of people have, is that they are sympathetic to the idea that if we invested more in education, or if we invested more in social-welfare programs and UBI (universal basic income), expanded health care, that there would be reduced crime in 20 years, in 30 years.

But that doesn’t really respond to the specific concern of, Tomorrow when I walk to school, am I going to get shot? Can you help distinguish between your analysis and that root cause analysis?

Ludwig: What I hear in Chicago is something that you hear in lots of cities around the United States, is like, Gun violence is just a symptom of poverty, and we’re never going to solve the gun-violence problem until we solve the poverty problem.

And let us all hope that’s not true, because, as you know even better than I do, we’ve been working really hard for decades to try and solve the poverty problem in the United States, and it’s proven to be very difficult. I think the key optimistic observation or suggestion that we get from this behavioral-economics perspective on the gun-violence problem is: We can make massive changes in the gun-violence problem by changing parts of the social environment that are much easier to change than poverty and segregation and all of these other super big, super important social problems.

If I could wave a wand and I could end poverty and segregation in Chicago, believe me—I’d be the first person to wave that wand. And so I’m not arguing against any of the policies trying to do that. They’re super important. It’s more like, What else can we do on top of that to really start to make a meaningful difference on the gun-violence problem?

And I can’t wave a wand and end poverty in Chicago, but what I can do is: I can make it easier to have commercial development in Greater Grand Crossing than we currently have here on the South Side of Chicago. I can strategically deploy money to turn a bunch of vacant lots that are littered with empty broken beer and tequila bottles and turn that into a little pocket park that people are willing to be in. I can put money into things like block clubs. I can do some version of what the University of Chicago does, like put unarmed private security guards on some key corners to make sure that there’s an eye on the street because of that. So there’s a bunch of pragmatic things that you can do that can really make a difference that sort of complement these other efforts to address these really big root causes.

And maybe the one other thing I would just add: You might look at that sort of strategy and say, To some people, that’s going to feel unsatisfying that it is addressing a symptom, not the underlying cause. Like, we’re leaving the root causes there, and we’re just treating the symptom of the root causes. But I actually think what that concern or that perspective misses is that the causal arrow runs in both directions between gun violence and root causes, if that makes sense.

And you can sort of see a lot of these communities are in vicious cycles right now, where it’s like: You’ve got a lot of gun violence. People and businesses leave—fewer eyes on the street, fewer community resources to build the kind of public infrastructure that helps address this problem, even more gun violence, even more people leaving. There are lots and lots of neighborhoods, lots and lots of cities that are trapped in that sort of vicious cycle.

But if you can get the gun-violence problem under control. I think you can see that you can turn those vicious cycles into virtuous cycles. I think of gun violence, you know, not as a symptom of some deeper thing but in many ways as the social problem for cities that sits upstream of so many of the other social problems that cities are trying to wrestle with.

Demsas: To give your model in layman’s terms: Gun violence and shootings happen because there’s a large availability of guns and because people are not interrupted in pulling those guns out in the midst of a heated moment. So as you point out in your book, the vast majority of shootings are happening in the course of an argument—not in a premeditated sense but in [the sense] that someone bumps you on the sidewalk, or they insult you, or something like that—and that violence, that shooting happens because there’s no one to step in and say, Hey. Let’s calm things down. Is that kind of the overview that you’re giving us?

Ludwig: Yeah. The highest-level version of this is: All of our policies have conceived of gun violence as a problem of System 2 slow thinking, when I think it’s, actually, mostly a problem of System 1 fast thinking.

And so for starters, we just need a big reorientation to understand differently what the problem actually is to be solved. And once you have that reorientation—once you sort of think of gun violence as a problem of not bad people unafraid of the criminal-justice system, not people in bad economic circumstances stealing to feed their families, but normal people making bad decisions in fraught, difficult, 10-minute windows—one thing that you start to do then is start to think about, How do I change the social environment so there are more people, more eyes on the street to sort of step in and interrupt? And the other thing that you start to think more seriously about is, like, How do I focus my social policies more on helping people understand their own minds better and anticipate what they’re going to do in these difficult 10-minute windows?

And one of the ways that we can do that is through a very different type of social program than we’ve typically thought of in the U.S.—these behavioral-economics-informed programs like Youth Guidance’s Becoming a Man or Heartland Alliance’s READI program or YAP and Brightpoints’ Choose to Change program. These are all things that we’ve subjected to randomized controlled trials in Chicago.

And what they basically are doing is: They’re helping people understand that they’ve got fast thinking as well as slow thinking and recognize that their fast thinking can get themselves into trouble in these fraught moments, and helping them anticipate that and sort of better navigate those 10-minute windows. And you can see in randomized experiments that that reduces risk of violence involvement by, depending on the study and the time period, like, 30 to 50 to 60 percent. How you scale that, I think, is the frontier scientific and policy challenge, but at least now we can sort of see the direction that we’ve got to go.

And the other thing I would just add is: I think this behavioral-economics perspective also helps us understand why education is so important for solving the violence problem, but not in the way that people have historically thought. Most people would say, Yeah, of course, education is so central to solving the crime problem, because education improves people’s earnings’ prospects, and blah, blah, blah.

And it’s true that education is hugely important for people’s earnings prospects, and education is good for making better citizens. It is good for lots and lots of reasons. But the other thing that the data tell us education does is: It helps people learn to be more slow thinking and skeptical of their own minds in high-stakes moments. That turns out to be sort of a key byproduct of everything that schools ask people to do.

And I think of education as, like, in many ways, the most important sort of crime-prevention, gun-violence prevention tool that we have. I think things like rote learning are not what we want either for educational purposes or from the perspective of making schooling as sort of crime preventive as possible. And so I think there are other ways of reimagining what school does, which would be good for making school sort of more helpful for a world in which things like problem-solving are increasingly important for economic outcomes, but also super valuable for making education more helpful in addressing the gun-violence problem.

Demsas: You alluded to this a couple of times now, but it’s interesting that there’s one way to interpret your result as just, as like, We need to put a bunch more cops on the street, and those can be the eyes on the street. And that is kind of consistent with the literature we explored in the Jen Doleac episode around why increasing numbers of police officers can reduce crime, and violent crime, in particular. And the other avenue—I mean, these are complementary—is that there needs to be more attention on how to improve people’s System 1 thinking. And the Becoming a Man program, which I think is now really popular, is a great example of that.

But scaling these sorts of things is really, really difficult, as you mentioned. Are you indifferent between these two policy avenues, like an increased number of police officers, versus investing in programs that improve people’s ability to understand their own System 1, System 2 thinking? Or is it that you really want people to do one of those over the other? And in which case, it does seem very difficult to scale Becoming a Man and other programs. We have not been able to do that, despite years and years of positive coverage of that program.

Ludwig: For starters, I would say, we should be pushing on every possible front to solve this problem. It’s a huge humanitarian problem, one of the key drivers of Black-white life expectancy disparities in the United States, hugely important for the future of our cities that are the key economic engine for the whole country. So I wouldn’t say, like, Let’s do this or this. If we have multiple things that could be helpful, I’d say, Let’s push on every front.

On the eyes-on-the-street stuff, I would say, There’s tons of scalable stuff there, and it’s not just hiring more cops. So you can hire more cops in cities that like cops. You can put unarmed security guards on the street. You can fund community-violence-intervention nonprofit groups. You can clean up vacant lots and turn them into parks. You can improve street lighting. You can change zoning laws and permitting rules and whatever to make it easier to have stores interspersed with residential in a neighborhood. Tons of different things there that you could do, depending on the local political environment in your city, all of which are super scalable, all of which would be super helpful, all of which would increase the chances that there’s some sort of prosocial adult around who can sort of step in and de-escalate something.

On top of that, I think then there’d be huge value in trying to figure out how to scale the social programs that also help people better understand their own sort of thinking. And I think one of the most exciting visions for the future here comes from artificial intelligence, weirdly. My University of Chicago colleague Oeindrila Dube did a fascinating study with Sandy Jo MacArthur, who used to be at LAPD for many years, and my friend Anuj Shah, at Princeton.

They basically did Becoming a Man for cops. And what was so interesting about it is: Becoming a Man works with teenagers in middle school and high school. And it’s, like, an adult working with these kids, and that’s super hard to scale, because the program counselor is expensive, and they vary in skill, and How do you hire enough people? and everything that makes a social program hard to scale.

But the Becoming a Man for cops—what they did is they had this artificial-intelligence-driven force simulator thing, where they give cops feedback to see when their System 1, their fast thinking, is leading them to an unhelpful response, through a bunch of simulation exercises that the AI can do. And you look at the randomized control data, and it seems to have remarkably helpful impacts.

And I think the thing that’s so exciting about that is: Thinking about AI as a human-capital development tool lets you see, Oh I see. Once you’ve got the software, the marginal cost for rerunning software is super low. And the great thing about software is that it basically runs the same way over and over again. So we might be looking at a future where AI can be a super valuable way to enhance human capacity in ways that include addressing one of the most important social problems facing cities, which is gun violence.

Demsas: We’ve gotten a little bit into this, but trying to compare all three theories that are kind of existing out there: When we’re thinking about the root causes theory, that leads us to believe that we should invest a ton in antipoverty measures and expand healthcare, job-training opportunities, UBI, whatever. And then the wickedness theory kind of indicates that we should just try to root out and incarcerate bad people for as long as possible to prevent them from doing crime. Your theory, the “unforgiving places” theory—what do you want policy makers to take from that?

Ludwig: The first thing I want policy makers to take from this is to recognize that the gun-violence problem itself is different from what we think. Again, it’s not a problem of System 2 deliberate, slow thinking, people responding to incentives. Gun violence is mostly driven by System 1, reactive, fast thinking. That’s the most important thing.

From there, I would say we need to do two types of things. We need to change those aspects of the social environment that reduce the risk that conflict escalates. And related to that is, too, just in the safety net, is whatever your position on the Second Amendment, I think this is also why guns out in public are particularly worrisome. If people want to have 500 guns in their basement locked up, that’s one thing. But when people are taking guns out on the street, that’s the thing that makes interpersonal conflict on the South Side of Chicago so much more dangerous than interpersonal conflict in the south side of London or whatever. So people around to deconflict conflict when it happens, and anything that we can do to get guns off the street would be super helpful.

And then I think policies that help people, you know, both K–12 education and things like, you know, Becoming a Man to try and help people better anticipate and navigate those 10-minute windows. And that’s a policy agenda that really doesn’t make much sense under either the conventional wisdom of the left or right, right now. Those things aren’t about changing people’s incentives, so it’s like, Why in the world would they possibly work? But I think they’re really central to making huge progress on the problem. And I think if you look at the experiences of L.A. and New York over the last 30 years, they validate that view, or they’re certainly very consistent with that view, at least.

Demsas: Jens, always our last and final question: What is an idea that you once thought was great and ended up being only good on paper?

Ludwig: Great—so we launched a big research project with the superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools a couple of years ago. The huge priority of this superintendent was truancy. So Chicago used to have something like 150 truancy officers for its 600 schools in 1991, and with budget cuts, they got rid of all of them. And then you look at the data and, like, there are tons of kids who are missing three or four weeks of school a year.

And so you look at that, and the superintendent is like, This surely is a key reason that kids are not doing well in school. So Jon Guryan and I launched this big research project with CPS, and we worked really hard to try and figure out how to get kids to come to school more often, without the punitive whatever of truancy officers. With a bunch of partners, we managed to figure out a way to get kids to come back to school more often. And then we look at the data, and we see it does not boost their learning at all.

Demsas: Oh wow.

Ludwig: So weird, so counterintuitive. You would think, If you don’t go to school, you can’t learn. It’s super intuitive. And yet, you get kids to come to school more often, and they don’t learn.

Demsas: Wait. What’s going on? Doesn’t that kind of conflict with a lot of ed-policy research?

Ludwig: Yeah. So super weird, right? And so it was only very recently that Jon and I were looking at data right after the pandemic, and what you can see in the data is, for instance, if you look at eighth graders in Chicago, the average eighth grader in Chicago academically is like a sixth grader. And something like a third-ish of Chicago eighth graders academically are, like, closer to fourth graders.

Demsas: Wow.

Ludwig: And the eighth-grade teachers—their feet are being held to the fire to teach eighth-grade content. And so then you ask yourself, Why is it the case that sending a kid who, academically, is at the fourth-grade level to school to be taught eighth-grade content doesn’t improve their learning? Like, to ask the question is to answer it.

Demsas: So it’s like, basically, the kids who are missing a bunch of school are more likely to be the kids who are way behind in school. And so they’re going to benefit less from being in school.

Ludwig: Exactly.

Demsas: Oh wow. That’s a very depressing answer.

Ludwig: Yeah, we were confusing, you know, What is a cause, and what is effect? And so it seemed good on paper. Now we realize that there’s a very different underlying problem that we’re working hard to fix. But that’s my depressing answer to leave you with.

Demsas: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was fantastic.

Ludwig: Thanks so much for having me on. It was great.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

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