Malcolm Gladwell on Tragic Dirt vs. Magic Dirt

The New Yorker pundit asks why so many murderers seem so low IQ.

In The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reviews the book Unforgiving Places that I wrote about on Substack a few weeks ago. The review contains Malcolm’s usual blend of insight and inanity.

What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime

A Chicago criminologist challenges our assumptions about why most shootings happen—and what really makes a city safe.

By Malcolm Gladwell

June 2, 2025

Most violence isn’t instrumental and planned around some gain; it’s expressive, born of flaring tempers—and unaffected by the calibration of penalties.

Late on a Sunday night in June of 2023, a woman named Carlishia Hood and her fourteen-year-old son, an honor student, pulled into Maxwell Street Express, a fast-food joint in West Pullman, on the far South Side of Chicago. Her son stayed in the car. Hood went inside. Maxwell is a no-frills place—takeout-style, no indoor seating. It’s open twenty-four hours a day. Hood asked for a special order—without realizing that at Maxwell, a busy place, special orders are frowned upon. The man behind her in line got upset; she was slowing things down. His name was Jeremy Brown. On the street, they called him the Knock-Out King. Brown began to gesticulate, his arms rising and falling in exasperation. He argued with Hood, growing more agitated. Then he cocked his fist, leaned back to bring the full weight of his body into the motion, and punched her in the head.

When the argument had started, Hood texted her son, asking him to come inside. Now he was at the door, slight and tentative in a white hoodie. He saw Brown punch his mother a second time. The boy pulled out a revolver and shot Brown in the back. Brown ran from the restaurant. The boy pursued him, still firing. Brown died on the street—one of a dozen men killed by gunfire in Chicago that weekend.

More details: the gun belonged to Mom, who had a concealed carry permit for it. (Back in my day in Chicago, concealed carry permits were very hard to obtain.) A witness said that Mom told her boy to pursue the wounded Brown and finish him off. She also told he child to shoot a woman who had sided with Brown in their dispute, but the boy did not.

Mom and son were eventually charged with first degree murder but then the charge was dropped a few days later and they were let out of jail.

In the remarkable new book “Unforgiving Places” (Chicago), Jens Ludwig breaks down the Brown killing, moment by moment. Ludwig is the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and he uses as a heuristic the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s version of the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking.

As I pointed out in my 2017 review of Michael Lewis’s biography of Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the two academics started out as IQ scientists for the Israel Defense Force, and they basically remained IQ guys for their whole careers.

Somehow, they managed to avoid having anybody notice that they were IQ scientists asking trick questions from IQ tests from hell (e.g., “Linda is a bank teller”). For example, here’s one of Kahneman’s brain-twisters:

The mean I.Q. of the population of eighth-graders in a city is known to be 100. You have selected a random sample of 50 children for a study of educational achievement. The first child tested has an I.Q. of 150. What do you expect the mean I.Q. to be for the whole sample?

Personally, I’d suspend judgement until I had more evidence. An IQ of 150 is so rare (1 in 2,330) that I’d wonder if something is wrong with either the test or the randomness of the sample. But to Kahneman’s extremely literal brain, this is merely a simple algebra problem. The question stipulated that the mean IQ is “known to be 100” and that’s all you need to know.

After Tversky’s death, Kahneman became absurdly fashionable.

According to Kahneman, these are the two cognitive modes that all human beings toggle between. The first is fast, automatic, and intuitive. The second is slow, effortful, and analytical.

I.e., System 2 is basically what IQ tests measure.

Ludwig’s innovation is to apply the dichotomy to criminal acts. A System 2 crime might be a carefully planned robbery, in which the assailant stalks and assesses his victims before attacking them. This is what criminologists call instrumental violence: acts, Ludwig writes, “committed in order to achieve some tangible or ‘instrumental’ goal (getting someone’s cash or phone or watch or drug turf), where violence is a means to some other, larger end.” A System 1 crime, by contrast, is an act of what Ludwig calls “expressive violence”—aimed not at gaining something tangible but at hurting someone, often in a sudden burst of frustration or anger.

E.g., hothead Sonny Corleone engages in System 1 criminal violence, whereas Dartmouth scholar Michael Corleone specializes in planning System 2 criminal violence.

The central argument of “Unforgiving Places” is that Americans, in their attempts to curb crime, have made a fundamental conceptual error.

As Tonto said to the Lone Ranger, “Who is this ‘we’ you are talking about, paleface?”

I’ve been aware that most murderers are morons for many decades. For example, in 1987 I read Bonfire of the Vanities, in which Assistant D.A. Kramer muses:

But the poor bastards behind the wire mesh barely deserved the term criminal, if by criminal you had in mind the romantic notion of someone who has a goal and seeks to achieve it through some desperate way outside the law. No, they were simpleminded incompetents, most of them, and they did unbelievably stupid, vile things.

Jill Leovy’s 2015 book Ghettoside makes clear how stupid most South Central Los Angeles killers are as well.

Malcolm goes on:

We’ve assumed that the problem is instrumental violence—and have fashioned our criminal-justice system around that assumption. But the real problem is expressive violence. The ongoing bloodshed in America’s streets is just Maxwell Street Express, over and over again.

In other words, most homicides are just low IQ idiots doing low IQ idiot stuff.

This is the puzzle that Ludwig sets out to solve in “Unforgiving Places.” His answer is that these episodes confound us only because we haven’t appreciated how utterly different System 1 criminality is from that of System 2. System 1 thinking is egocentric: it involves, Ludwig writes, interpreting “everything through the lens of ‘What does this have to do with me?’ ” It depends on stark binaries—reducing a range of possibilities to a simple yes or no—and, as he notes, it “focuses more on negative over positive information.” In short, it’s wired for threats. System 1 catastrophizes. It imagines the worst.

In sum, System 1 thinkers tend to have low IQs and thus do low IQ things like punch women in chicken restaurants.

Paywall here. Over 2100 words after the paywall break.