The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life

by Gneezy, Uri

  How can we spend our taxpayer dollars to most effectively lower teen gun violence?

  The Data Driller

  Ron Huberman has served as one of the most brilliant public servants in Chicago (or perhaps anywhere). A handsome, deep-voiced, openly gay ex-cop, Huberman was born in Tel Aviv in 1971, the second son of two Holocaust survivors who went to Israel as tiny children after most of their own families had perished. His parents moved him and his older brother to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, when Huberman was five years old. His mother, a onetime concert pianist and linguist, went to work for the local high school, where she taught foreign languages. His father, a brilliant and prolific cell biologist, accepted a job working for the government doing cancer research. “My dad had tons of offers to work for pharmaceutical companies,” Huberman recalls, “but he chose to do medical research for the government, earning less than he would have otherwise because he felt that he could make a difference for people. I think his decision led me to have my own sense of public service and a desire to give back.”

  In elementary and middle school, Huberman was not a very serious student, but he did manage to get good grades in high school and entered the University of Wisconsin, where he studied English and psychology. After he graduated, he went to the police academy, became a cop in 1995, and went to work on Chicago’s graveyard shift. Being on the police force, he recalls, gave him a front-row seat to observe what works and what doesn’t in a big, violence-prone city.

  Murders in Chicago had been steadily rising over the years; the 1990s proved to be one of the worst decades for homicides in the city. In 1992, there were 943 murders in a city of fewer than three million people, resulting in a murder rate of 34 per 100,000. In 1999, 6,000 people in the city of Chicago got shot. Of those, 1,000 died. Answering calls about shootings in public housing projects, Huberman says, “taught me about the degree to which people simply become resigned to horror. There wasn’t a night when someone wasn’t shot or killed. The community’s sense of moral outrage disappeared beneath a kind of fatigue as the shootings went on and on.”

  Having seen too many young people die, Huberman felt that there must be a smarter way for the police to do things. He began asking himself what levers might be strengthened and pulled to make the police force more effective. The police could not do anything much to change things on their own; they were mostly responding to crime rather than preventing it. So Huberman decided to go back to school during the daylight hours and pursue master’s degrees in two wildly different—some might even say opposing—disciplines: social work and business.

  Shortly thereafter, Huberman was promoted up the ranks to the level of assistant deputy superintendent of police. One of his first postgraduate projects was to bring the police force into the information age by developing the equivalent of an electronic medical records system. “Before this system, everything was done on paper,” he recalls. “If an assault occurred, the witness would say, ‘The guy had a tattoo of a bunny on his shoulder.’ The investigator would then have to go into the basement and spend hour after hour looking through hundreds of pink paper forms looking for descriptions of assaults, and try to find one or two that mentioned a bunny tattoo. It took forever to get enough information on enough suspects to form a lineup or to identify crime patterns.”

  The force didn’t have the millions of dollars it would take to turn this mess into a real-time electronic database, so Huberman went hat in hand to the giant software firm Oracle and persuaded them to develop it, telling them that they could go on and sell the system to other police forces around the country. Oracle took the bait and put in $10 million to do the work. Huberman gave them the information they needed to build it; a matching grant campaign pulled in the rest of the money.

  The Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting System (a.k.a. CLEAR) has changed the equation on crime in Chicago. Today, when an assault occurs, the victim tells the policeman that the guy had a bunny tattoo on his shoulder, and tapping into his electronic device, the cop can identify likely offenders on the spot. Commanders can also strategically deploy officers to hot spots where crime is likely to occur. CLEAR has allowed police commanders to test their hypotheses on a regular basis. Are crime reductions, for example, better achieved through drug-related arrests, or gang-related arrests? The data show which police officers are most effective in reducing crime, and officers are promoted on the basis of that data. Today we believe that, partly due to this system, shootings in Chicago are down by two-thirds from the time CLEAR went live in 1999.

  Cultivating Calm

  After setting up CLEAR, Huberman quickly implemented similar systems in other large, complex, culturally complicated city government organizations. Following September 11, 2001, the day when all the big cities in the country were placed on high alert, Mayor Richard Daley decided to put Huberman in charge of a variety of big systems management challenges in very short order. When he appointed Huberman, Mayor Daley said, “I have utmost faith in him. I can go to sleep at night, and just close my eyes. I don’t have to worry about Ron Huberman.”

  Huberman became like Chicago’s own version of Superman, attacking one big, thorny problem after another and saving the day in each case. Huberman started with emergency management. His job: to coordinate agencies protecting the city from terror attacks, public health crises, and natural disasters—and figure out a way to handle the more than 21,000 calls to 911 every day. He created an integrated command center to coordinate all of the city’s resources during crises—a system that then US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called “revolutionary.” Next, in 2005, Huberman went to work as Mayor Daley’s chief of staff, where he was put in charge of rooting out city corruption and bringing accountability to city government. Then Huberman overhauled the Chicago Transit Authority, where he vastly improved ridership experience and renegotiated collective bargaining agreements for all twenty-one of the Transit Authority’s unions. In his spare time, he launched the largest ex-offender hiring program in the country.

  All these systems relied on the same statistic-tracking, data-drilling methodology that characterized CLEAR. In each case, Huberman put together teams of like-minded, cross-disciplinary people in various departments. Together, they created detailed, measurement-oriented statistical tracking systems that often pulled in data beyond traditional government sources, and that laid out clear performance goals for people in every area of city government.

  In 2009, not long after Derrion Albert’s murder and Arne Duncan, then the head of Chicago Public Schools, went to work for President Obama as secretary of education, Huberman took over Duncan’s job as CEO. Shortly after assuming the job, Huberman began attacking the problem of teen shootings. With the help of federal stimulus money, Huberman launched a program called Culture of Calm. The program targeted a handful of high-risk Chicago schools and threw every single intervention they could think of at them. Researchers scrutinized everything that put kids at risk of violence, from the way students were disciplined to the design of the entryways. Teachers put in more effort with at-risk students. Additional school counselors were hired. Once the at-risk children received the attention they needed, the cultures of the schools began to change. But to really alter the landscape, something more was needed.

  Enter Kanye West, the famous rapper and record producer. If anyone is a motivator for urban black kids, he is. A handsome, daring, outspoken, square-jawed black man who favors a leather skirt and a hoodie when performing, West has collected awards aplenty for his five solo albums, all of which have gone platinum; he’s also one of the best-selling digital artists of all time.3

  Talking with Huberman about an incentive featuring West, we decided that an intimate concert with the superstar (who would give the concert pro bono) would really get the attention of the kids in the thirty-two most violent schools. So we offered the prize of a private concert to the school that would most profoundly change its culture for the better. Every school had its own Culture of Ca
lm committee, and the competition among the schools was fierce.

  Farragut High School, the winner of the prize, underwent a huge transformation as a result of the Culture of Calm program. Located on Chicago’s southwest side, the school’s population is roughly 70 percent Hispanic and 30 percent African American. Before the Culture of Calm program began, the hallways were filled with kids behaving aggressively toward each other—pushing and shoving, throwing insults and sometimes punches. The only adults visible were roving security guards who literally pushed kids through the doors of their classes when the bells rang.

  Farragut High students started by forming a Culture of Calm committee comprised of student leaders—not just the class president and student council, but “influential” kids who played football and so on. It was this committee’s job to decide the basic rules, and they also agreed to two big, overarching requirements: a marked improvement in school attendance and a reduction of violence-based incidents not just in school, but outside school as well.

  Motivated by the competition for the prize, the kids went to work applying peer pressure. The incentive worked like magic. While all the schools in the Culture of Calm program showed dramatic reductions in violence and a boost in attendance, Farragut reported that incidents of misconduct dropped by a whopping 40 percent.

  Of course, the concert, held in Farragut’s gym in June 2010, was fabulous. West brought along two other adored performers—Lupe Fiasco, who performed his hit song “Superstar,” followed by another superstar, Common, who performed “Universal Mind Control.” Then came West, and the students went wild. For them, it was an unforgettable night.

  But as it turned out, the concert incentive isn’t what really turned things around. The opportunity to see West, in fact, merely legitimized what the kids already wanted: a safe place to learn. “They cared about seeing him, but even more importantly, they felt free to stand up to say ‘We want a safe school,’” Huberman says. To that end, the students succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. At all of the thirty-two schools in the program, the culture at the schools has remained calm. Teachers are in the hallways; kids don’t pick fights. And violent incidents such as shootings have dropped by 30 percent.

  So was this Huberman’s only solution? As it turns out, this was just the tip of the iceberg.

  Operation Chicago Public Schools Secret Service

  A month after Derrion Albert was murdered, Huberman sat at a table in a school auditorium confronting a roomful of angry parents and teachers. They had come to tell him off for wanting to spend a whopping $60 million on a two-year experimental program to reduce school violence, while the rest of the budget was being slashed to the bone. Some teachers had lost their jobs; others faced oversized classrooms. And parents of students who weren’t in danger didn’t understand why so much money would be diverted toward an untested idea for helping the “bad” kids turn their lives around.

  Huberman challenged the assembly. “Which is more important—reducing class size or saving lives?” he asked. In a typical year, he pointed out, more than 250 students were shot and, on average, 30 of these shootings were fatal. As a former cop, he’d personally witnessed too many tragedies, and they’d gotten to him. Besides, he argued, kids in dangerous schools could not focus on academics anyway because they had something much larger, such as the possibility of being murdered, on their minds. After a shooting, attendance dropped to 50 percent. “If you are a logical, motivated kid, and a shooting occurs near your school, do you risk your life or risk falling behind in your classes?” Huberman asked. “And if you are a teacher at one of these schools, and half your kids don’t show up, do you reteach when the frightened kids come back, and slow everyone else down? What does it take to break out of this cycle?”

  Huberman got his way, though plenty of parents continued to question his wisdom—arguing that the academic programs were being shortchanged. Perhaps the boldest aspect of Huberman’s plan was a program that would identify the kids who were most at risk—the ones who were the most likely to be involved in a shooting crime. The program would match an at-risk student with a highly paid advocate who, in Huberman’s words, would “act as mentor, advocate, and engaged adult who could serve as a parent figure to the youths.” To get the project started, Huberman asked us this question: Out of 700 schools and 400,000-plus students, how do we figure out who is most likely to be part of a shooting crime? He figured if that question could be answered, then the system could intervene effectively. Without that information, the system would fail with certainty, he concluded.

  So we set to work. First, our research team looked at retrospective data covering 500 shootings between September 2007 and October 2009. We wanted to see if we could decipher which factors put kids most at risk.4 What did we find?

  The first factor may seem blindingly obvious: it’s being male. Race also plays a strong role, with Hispanics and African Americans pretty much running the same risk, but at a level much higher than Caucasians. And then there were the behavioral issues (school misconduct, past shootings, test scores, progress toward graduation, suspensions, incarceration history, and so on). Of these, the strongest predictor was having spent time in a juvenile detention center. This group had victimization rates more than ten times higher than that of a Caucasian student and six times higher than the typical African American or Hispanic male.

  We also found that serious misconduct, absences, juvenile detention, and being over-age (that is, being held back a grade) were particularly detrimental for African American males, and suspensions and absences were strong predictors for Hispanics. For example, a seventeen-year-old freshman in high school was at considerably more risk than a fifteen-year-old freshman. Additionally, we learned that shooting crimes typically happened in the hours before or after school—a factor that explained why many kids who did well in other classes flunked first and last periods. They didn’t show up because they were scared of the gangs that congregated at those hours.

  As it turned out, our filters were fairly accurate, especially considering a shooting event usually only happens with a small number of kids. Out of all the students in Chicago Public Schools, we found that roughly 10,000 out of 410,000 (or 2.5 percent) of students were at serious risk of gun violence. Most of these at-risk students attended one of thirty-two schools in rough neighborhoods, were Hispanic or African American, and tended to live in poverty. Out of 410,000 kids, 1,200 students fit the model for very high risk. They needed intervention, and fast.

  Now that we’d identified the most-at-risk students, the next step was to pair them with mentors through a program called Youth Advocate Programs, Inc. (YAP). One of YAP’s mentors is Chris Sutton, a forty-year-old, African American, married father of two, who owns a car wash and holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing. Sutton describes his dangerous job in five short words: “I keep my clients alive.”

  YAP pays Sutton between $12 and $30 per hour for each of his five clients/students, so he earns between $60 and $150 per hour in total. The pay is certainly good—yes, it “pays enough” to incentivize him—but it’s a dangerous, twenty-four-hours-a-day job, and he says that the money isn’t his chief motivator. Sutton really wants to help at-risk kids; he knows that if they were left alone on the streets, they would surely die. So he drops his young clients off at school in the morning and picks them up in the afternoon—the two times when school violence is at its peak. He takes them to work, and then to dinner and home in the evenings. He’s on call the rest of the time.

  One of Sutton’s most recent ultra-high-risk clients was an impulsive young black man named Darren who pretty much fit all our criteria for shooting victimhood. Darren’s parents are addicts who’ve spent time in prison. “If you are surrounded by people who are always doing the wrong thing, you have to be ten times stronger to do the right thing,” Sutton observes. All of Darren’s friends dropped out of high school, and because Darren has so often been in trouble, he has missed a lot of school, making him older than his peers.
He was on probation for bringing a loaded gun to school. He lives with a foster parent in Englewood, a very dangerous section of Chicago where drive-by shootings are a daily occurrence. “It’s like the OK Corral over there,” says Sutton.

  Darren is bright and hardworking, and he holds a city job, cleaning gutters and parks, that he procured through YAP. Unfortunately, he has a habit of gambling his paychecks away, and it’s been a struggle for him to understand that all his impulsive actions have consequences. Because Darren is highly suspicious of institutions and adults, Sutton has had to walk a fine line to earn his trust. “You have to go undercover with kids like him,” Sutton says. “You have to dress like they do, listen to the same music, and listen deeply. You collect intelligence about the really bad kids, and alert the school principals to them so we can get them into YAP, too.”

  While the program indeed saves lives, mentoring is very risky work. One day, Darren and other YAP kids with Sutton happened to cross the wrong line. Darren got into an argument with another kid, and then a gang member from a rival group entered the fray. Soon the bullets were flying. Darren and another student were hit. Sutton reclined his seat in the car, called 911, and prayed.

  The good news is that Darren survived the shooting. He has managed to graduate high school. To his own astonishment, he even pulled a B in music, and tells Sutton he couldn’t have done it without the help YAP provides. And Darren is still holding down a job with the city. “If kids like Darren can hang in there and get through high school, they will be prepared to hold a full-time job—provided they can secure one—after they graduate,” Sutton says. “We can’t take tests for them, but we can provide safe transportation, study help, and guidance. And eventually we can pull off the training wheels.”