The Housing Crisis Is Not an Accident

For generations, systemic discrimination has suffocated poor Black communities, chaining individuals to an ongoing struggle that persists today. Wages rarely stretch far enough to cover rent, food, or transportation for many. The constant threat of an unexpected medical bill or reduced work hours looms over individuals, shaking the already fragile foundation of their lives. One missed rent payment, and the fear of eviction becomes real: the knock at the door, the ultimatum, the crushing reality of losing the little you have. It’s a cycle of survival, where every day feels like walking a tightrope without a safety net. 

As the poor persevere through such hardships, landlords serve a parasitic role created by the capitalist machine, pouncing on tenants’ financial vulnerabilities.

Under the current social order, capital is mobilized to snatch shelter away from the masses, hold it at ransom, and see who’s desperate enough to pay for what should be a basic human right: a safe place to call home. Housing functions as a tool to generate wealth for those who own it. Landlords are profiteers, charging what the market will bear, knowing that people will pay whatever they must to keep a roof over their heads.

Rent isn’t just an exchange for space. What tenants are really paying for is the right to avoid homelessness. 

We must be clear. Landlords don’t set the housing laws or market conditions. They simply take advantage of a capitalist system that turns shelter into a commodity, where those with the means exploit scarcity by charging high rents, imposing fees, and cycling through tenants to extract maximum profit. The issue is systemic, not individual.

Capitalism locks home ownership out of reach for many, forcing people into an overcrowded rental market. With wages stagnant, prices skyrocketing, and housing options dwindling, landlords hold the power to demand more, knowing tenants have nowhere else to go.  

Landlords become the gatekeepers to a fundamental human need, extracting much needed currency from those already struggling. It’s a role that creates instability, widens inequality, and fuels social disharmony—not because landlords are inherently evil individuals or acting out of personal spite, but because capitalism rewards them for manufacturing scarcity. Economic self-interest becomes the engine of exploitation, turning housing into a battleground where profit is attained for the few by jeopardizing the survival of the many.

If everyone had secure, affordable housing—if no one was desperate—landlords wouldn’t have the same power to demand exorbitant rents. Why? Because people wouldn’t be forced to accept whatever price is thrown at them out of fear of ending up on the street. They could walk away, find better options, or simply stay put without worrying about constant rent hikes.

 But when housing is scarce and people are desperate, landlords and investors hold all the power. This is Economics 101—supply and demand. They know you’ll pay whatever they ask because the alternative—homelessness—is unthinkable. Desperation is the foundation of their leverage. If everyone had stability, that leverage disappears. No desperation, no power to exploit. No power to exploit, no sky-high profits. It’s that simple—and that brutal.

The History

Housing exploitation is rooted in historical practices such as redlining in the 1930s, where the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) used red ink to mark African American neighborhoods, such as Chicago’s South Side, as high-risk, denying Black families access to mortgages. By marking these neighborhoods as undesirable, the government and private banks justified disinvestment—pulling resources, funding, and services out of these communities. Economic rot was the consequence. Banks closed their doors, streets slowly crumbled, the paint on the houses peeled. Decades have passed but the stain of that red ink remains. The 1968 Fair Housing Act came too late and provided too little. The damage was done.

Compounding urban instability were mid-20th century eminent domain and urban renewal projects. Detroit’s Black Bottom, for example, was a vibrant African American community that was demolished in the 1950s and 1960s for highways and commercial development. Now, highways carve through the land like scars, concrete sprawling where homes once stood. Families were displaced—thousands of them—without fair compensation, without anywhere to go. Community ties were dissolved. Vulnerable people found themselves stranded; their social capital erased. The vibrant culture, the support networks, the local businesses evaporated into thin air.

Furthermore, the politically framed “War on Drugs,” initiated under President Reagan and continued by subsequent administrations, disrupted family stability by incarcerating primary breadwinners and traumatizing familial bystanders. This further strained household finances and made it more difficult to maintain security in one’s housing situation. In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act, which imposed strict work requirements on welfare recipients—without ensuring an increase in available jobs to meet those demands—and lifetime limits on assistance, pushing many poor families deeper into poverty. 

The 2008 financial crisis exacerbated these challenges, exploiting Black and Brown communities through subprime mortgages. For instance, Prince George’s County, Maryland, a predominantly African American suburb, faced high foreclosure rates from predatory lending, worsening racial disparities in homeownership and wealth.

More recently, the $2.3 trillion Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 significantly reduced tax burdens for wealthy individuals and corporations. To balance the budget, the government offset the revenue loss by cutting funding for social services like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), effectively transferring wealth upwards. This deliberate policy choice exacerbated food insecurity and increased the financial burden on families struggling to pay rent, disproportionately impacting Black and Brown communities, escalating desperation and thus landlord’s leveraging power.

Despite persistent activism from housing advocates and community organizers, inclusionary zoning laws and affordable housing initiatives often fall short of addressing the needs of low-income residents. After going through the political system, the aim of these policies is warped by corporate-controlled politicians. While the activists and organizers intend to create mixed-income communities, the politicians end up catering to the interests of the developers funding their political campaigns.

In New York City, the rezoning of neighborhoods like East Harlem has led to the displacing of long-term residents and the disrupting of community networks. Skyscrapers of glass and steel tower stand where brownstones and bodegas once were, and only a fraction of the units are “affordable”—and even those stretch the word beyond recognition.

The Covid-19 pandemic laid bare the harsh realities of capitalism, with vacant luxury apartments in New York reaching a 14-year high, while countless people faced eviction and homelessness. The wealthy continued to benefit, perched high in their towers, looking down on the scattered, fragmented, and forgotten communities below.

Masquerading as representatives of their communities, politicians usher in gentrification policies that displace and injure low-income residents. They sweep away lives and cultures, handing the reigns to corporate entities keen on replacing them with glass towers and chain coffee shops, their gleaming facades masking the hollowness inside.

Take San Francisco’s Mission District. Once a lively hub of art, music, food—a tapestry of Latinx culture alive in every corner, from the murals splashed across walls to the family-owned bakeries on every block. But gentrification, parading as “urban revitalization” marches in with bulldozers and development plans. Long-standing residents, those who built this community, are uprooted. The rent spikes, and suddenly the place that’s been home for generations is no longer affordable.

What rises in their place? Sterile luxury condos, corporate storefronts. Independent bookstores and mom-and-pop diners give way to trendy cocktail bars and minimalist cafés that charge a small fortune for a single espresso. Gentrification leaves nothing but polished emptiness.

But let’s not pretend that life was ever easy in marginalized communities before gentrification. Places like East Harlem or the Mission District were already hanging by a thread—underfunded schools, crumbling infrastructure, jobs that paid just enough to get by. The cracks were always there. Yet, even in the middle of this struggle, there was something else. Resilience. The kind that grows out of shared hardship. Block parties brought the streets alive, murals told stories of pride and history, and mom-and-pop shops provided more than just goods—they provided community, connection. People weren’t living in comfort, but they were living together, holding onto what they had. The struggle was real, but so was the culture that came out of it.

Today, the fight for survival has only intensified. Not too long ago, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order mandating the aggressive clearance of homeless encampments across the state, emboldened by a Supreme Court ruling that permits the criminalization of sleeping in public spaces, even when no shelter beds are available. This decree has unleashed a wave of brutality across the state, where homeless individuals find themselves relentlessly hunted by the state's cruel machinery. Bulldozers roll in without warning, obliterating makeshift homes and crushing what little remains of a person's life into dust. 

The very ground beneath these people, who already endure the harshest of life's realities, is stripped away as they are driven from one desolate spot to another, as if their mere existence is an offense to be punished. There is no refuge, no peace, just the constant dread of being erased by the state’s unfeeling, iron fist. In Atlanta, the system erased a man entirely—his life crushed under the wheels of a city truck during a brutal clearing, a stark reminder that for the marginalized, even survival is too much to ask.

The capitalist system forces hundreds of thousands of Americans into the harsh reality of homelessness, then has the audacity to sneer, "You don't belong here," without offering any place where they do. 

Homelessness is weaponized as a calculated means of control. Whether the fear grips us openly or simmers quietly beneath our awareness, we all live under its shadow, constantly reminded that we must obey capitalism’s unforgiving "rulebook"—a set of rigid demands dictating how we struggle, scrape by, and strive within its exploitative machinery. Capitalism doesn’t allow you to fight on your own terms; you must play by its rules or be cast into the same merciless void of homelessness, with no other options left.

Impoverished communities, particularly impoverished Black communities, are left to battle for scraps, wages stuck while the cost of living keeps climbing. Healthcare is inadequate. Childcare is unaffordable. Public spaces fall into disrepair, parks become overgrown, roads crack and schools are left to rot. Overdue bills pile up, rent skyrockets, and resources shrink. Affordable education and job training are kept out of reach. Grocery stores, banks, and companies offering stable employment choose not to invest and set up shop in these areas, afraid of the risks they think they see. That absence of opportunity only deepens the struggle. Unemployment grows. Infrastructure decays.

Crime emerges—not because of supposed cultural inferiority or a lack of a moral compass, but because neglect breeds desperation. Businesses avoid these communities because they fear hardship, but the hardship comes from the very lack of opportunity their absence creates. In their place, predatory businesses move in—payday lenders, liquor stores, fast food chains—profiting from the struggle and locking these neighborhoods into an even tighter grip of poverty.

Capitalism's relentless logic demands increasing profit by escalating desperation. By 2024, homelessness in the United States surged to a record high, displacing over 770,000 people. For many, poverty is the rhythm of life. A cycle that spins in place, generation after generation.

Cyclical Economic Vulnerability

Poor renters often face various catastrophes—be it an emergency medical bill, a car crash, reduced work hours, an unpaid parking ticket, or an encounter with law enforcement that results in jail time due to an inability to post bail. Since nearly half of renter households in the U.S. are burdened by landlords charging them more than 30% of their income for rent, with a significant percentage paying over 50%, renters are left with limited resources to handle these shocks. Thus, unexpected expenses often push tenants behind on rent, compelling them to allocate nearly all their income to catch up. Despite these efforts, many end up evicted.

Evictions enable landlords to either replace tenants with those who can afford higher rents or create scarcity that pressures remaining tenants into accepting worsening living conditions. Our tenant-hostile legal system makes it easy for landlords to evict over minor infractions—like late fees, unauthorized guests, or small lease violations—creating a constant threat of displacement that forces tenants to stay silent about unsafe conditions, neglect, or exploitation for fear of losing their home. Additionally, in many jurisdictions, tenants do not have the right to legal representation in eviction court, making it challenging to contest unfair evictions. Before New York City's “Right to Counsel” law, only 1% of tenants had legal representation compared to 95% of landlords. Even after the law was enacted, inconsistent representation rates persist​.

Frequent evictions and dilapidated living conditions destabilize communities, leading to a chilling cycle of poverty and crime. As Jane Jacobs observed in her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, such precarious circumstances erode a community’s ability to self-regulate and maintain order. Constant disruptions—like the relentless cycle of illness, mounting stress, and constant absenteeism—become fractures in the foundation of a person’s life. Every time your body gives in to sickness, or stress becomes too heavy to carry, you lose ground. Bit by bit, the ability to maintain steady employment or keep up in school slips away. It’s like running in quicksand: the harder you try to push through, the deeper you sink. And with every absence, the gap widens. You fall behind at work, at school, in life.

And it’s not just you. When your health falters, and stress grips you tight, your connections to your community weaken. The heartbeat of your neighborhood—the informal ways people help each other, keep each other safe—begins to fade away. You’re not just losing time at work or missing a class; you’re losing the ability to show up for your neighbors, to be part of the web of mutual support that makes a community function. Suddenly, it’s harder for everyone.

The neighborhood itself starts to splinter; a once tight-knit place now plagued by insecurity. The sense of safety, of community, begins to erode. Whether it’s a broken streetlight, rising crime, or a struggling local business, problems become harder to solve. Because when people can’t stay involved, when they’re trapped in a cycle of sickness and stress, the fibers that hold a community together start to tear.

If you can’t be there, and your neighbor can’t be there, who’s left to help when a house fire strikes—who’s there to offer temporary shelter or basic necessities? When a medical emergency hits, who’s there to drive someone to the hospital, pick up prescriptions, or provide meals? When an eviction notice arrives, who’s there to organize support, share legal resources, or help cover rent? Without that web of mutual aid, everyone is left to face these crises alone.

Jane Jacobs' theory underscores the importance of stable housing for urban safety, where the presence of "eyes on the street" and active community engagement naturally deter anti-social and violent behavior. Yet, in today's poor communities, the constant flux caused by evictions shatters these social bonds, undermining informal surveillance and community cohesion.

Jacobs advocated for mixed-use developments where residential, distribution, and recreational activities are intertwined, ensuring different people are present at various times of the day, thereby maintaining continuous informal surveillance. However, poor neighborhoods are typically segregated zones with limited provisional (e.g. supermarkets, pharmacies, etc.) and recreational spaces (e.g. parks, community centers, etc.), resulting in streets that are empty at certain times of the day, reducing the natural surveillance that deters crime.

Efforts to build low-income housing are designed to fail from the outset, creating environments that are physically crumbling and socially strained. High-rise towers, hastily constructed with the cheapest materials, develop cracks in walls within months, while ceilings buckle under constant leaks. Elevators break down frequently, sometimes for weeks at a time, forcing elderly or disabled residents to be effectively trapped in their apartments. Thin walls amplify every sound, turning private moments into shared burdens. This leads to noise complaints from tenants who can hear their neighbors’ conversations, footsteps, and even phone vibrations. In cities like Los Angeles and Atlanta, tenants frequently report that new, expensive apartments are functionally unlivable due to noise pollution.

The emphasis on awarding contracts to the lowest bidder ensures substandard construction, while funding cuts mean basic repairs often go ignored for years. This isn’t just an occasional problem—it’s an inherent flaw in the capitalist model of housing development, where developers are incentivized to build as quickly and cheaply as possible, sell or rent units at inflated prices, and then offload responsibility onto someone else before the true cost of their negligence catches up.

Overcrowding compounds these issues. In many developments, units are packed into as little space as possible, prioritizing density over livability. Narrow hallways and poorly ventilated spaces amplify tension, forcing too many families to share too little room. The lack of outdoor spaces or community areas means children play in hazardous parking lots, while adults navigate a world where small disputes over noise or space escalate into community-wide conflicts.

In projects like New York’s Pruitt-Igoe or Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, overcrowding and neglect created a powder keg. With no investment in social infrastructure—like parks, libraries, or community centers—residents were left to endure the frustration of living on top of one another with no escape. These developments became breeding grounds for social breakdown, not because of some flaw of the people living there, but because of the deliberate design choices that treated them as an afterthought rather than as human beings deserving of dignity and space.

Further, with parents working multiple jobs just to put food on the table and schools lacking the funding for robust after-school programming, adolescents are left with little to occupy their time during the crucial after-school hours. This gap creates a dangerous void, as statistics show that juvenile crime peaks between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. with 26% of violent crimes committed by youth occurring during these hours when supervision is minimal and structured activities are scarce. Without safe, productive outlets or the informal community networks that once kept an eye on things, many young people turn to the streets, making it far easier for them to get caught up in crime.

The absence of vibrant public life in impoverished areas enables scandalous activities to go unnoticed and unchallenged. Jacobs theorized that short blocks with many intersections encourage foot traffic, increasing the number of people on the street and making it difficult for illicit activities to occur unnoticed. However, poor communities often have long, monotonous “Superblocks” with fewer intersections, which discourages foot traffic and reduces the presence of "eyes on the street.”

The problems, of course, worsen with evictions. Families facing eviction are plunged into deeper economic instability, often moving to neighborhoods with even fewer resources and opportunities. Children of evicted families suffer intense trauma and instability, as is expected when a child is subjected to the upheaval of frequently changing schools, losing friends, and lacking a stable bed to sleep in. These disturbances contribute to emotional issues, leading children to lash out, and their parents, under extreme stress, often respond in kind, resulting in rampant intra-family violence and even sexual abuse and molestation.

In fact, housing instability is directly linked to an increased risk of child neglect, primarily due to heightened maternal stress. This insecurity significantly contributes to the risk of child maltreatment, independent of other economic hardships. This trauma and instability experienced by families, especially children, leads to long-term economic and social disadvantages, perpetuating poverty and limiting future opportunities, which ties back to the high rent burdens and economic vulnerability described above.

A clear conclusion emerges: Stable housing is essential for maintaining serenity and safety.

Yet under capitalism, stable housing can never and will never be a reality for everyone. Capitalism depends on some people lacking stable housing to drive up demand, cut maintenance costs, and maximize profits.

Despite the clear evidence provided by Jacobs' insights, politicians and media outlets—inextricably wedded to the capitalist project—deliberately ignore and obfuscate these solutions. Held accountable by corporate donors and the media’s sensationalist opportunism, politicians fulfill their true mandate: to sustain and expand capitalism as they (or more accurately, their donors) see fit. They seize the moment, using high crime rates and social instability as a pretext to demand more policing, reinforcing the very systems that perpetuate these crises.

This approach serves to channel more individuals into the prison-industrial complex, where massive numbers of deeply wounded people are reduced to modern-day slaves. Nearly 65% of incarcerated people, about 800,000 individuals, work while in prison. Over 76% of these workers face torturous punishments, such as solitary confinement or loss of family visitation, if they refuse or cannot work. As workers, they have no control over their assignments, are excluded from minimum wage and overtime protections, cannot unionize, lack adequate training, and face unsafe working conditions. Consequently, 64% worry about their safety, 70% receive no formal job training, and 70% cannot afford basic necessities with their wages. Annually, they produce at least $2 billion in goods and $9 billion in prison maintenance services. Most states pay prisoners between 15 and 52 cents per hour, with seven states paying nothing for most work. Up to 80% of their paychecks are withheld for various expenses​​.

In Arkansas, an incarcerated population of mostly black individuals are picking cotton on former slave plantations for no pay. That is slavery.

Such intense exploitation lowers production costs for the businesses using enslaved laborers, allowing them to gain an edge on companies that pay market wages.

If a company refuses to use prison labor while others in the industry do, it risks becoming less competitive, reducing profit margins, and ultimately failing to maximize shareholder returns. In a world where corporate raiders, activist investors, and private equity firms scrutinize financial decisions, a company that refuses to use prison labor could be accused of mismanaging resources or failing to pursue legally available cost-cutting measures. Shareholders could sue under the argument that executives breached their fiduciary duty by passing up an opportunity to improve profit margins. While no law explicitly forces companies to use prison labor, the logic of capitalist competition and shareholder primacy creates a powerful incentive—one that can be framed as a de facto legal obligation.

The widespread use of prison labor drives down wages across industries, reducing the bargaining power of non-incarcerated workers. This makes it increasingly difficult for them to secure stable, well-paying jobs, contributing to rising rates of eviction, homelessness, and housing insecurity.

To make matters more dire, upon release, those subjected to this carceral system face legal discrimination reminiscent of Jim Crow laws, including being barred from public housing, food stamps, jury duty, and often the right to vote. If friends or family attempt to provide shelter in public housing units, they risk eviction and legal repercussions themselves, making mutual aid dangerous. Consequently, the cycle of eviction, poverty, and social instability worsens, as even familial support systems are dismantled.

 By Design, Not Chance

 Publicly traded companies are relentless profit machines, driven by a ruthless obligation to fatten the pockets of their shareholders. Those in the housing development industry are no exception. To feed the insatiable appetite built into the capitalist model, housing development corporations manipulate housing markets.

They manufacture scarcity, deliberately evicting tenants and stripping communities of affordable housing. The engineered shortage sends desperate families scrambling for shelter, driving demand to frenzied heights. Landlords, drunk on greed, jack up rents to exploit this misery, milking every penny from the vulnerable. And you can forget about any genuine attempt at unit maintenance. Why bother when the market’s thirst for housing means tenants will endure crumbling walls, missing doors, jammed locks, backed-up toilets, dirty tap water, and leaking roofs just to have a place to lay their heads? This orchestrated decay grows the profit margins, shooting share prices through the roof. Banks join the feeding frenzy, gorging on inflated mortgage values and bloated interest incomes, while investment firms and real estate developers rake in obscene returns as property values skyrocket.

Politicians, controlled by financial contributions from corporate entities, support policies favoring real estate development and deregulation. The real estate industry has spent millions lobbying both Democrats and Republicans for favorable tax policies and reduced tenant protections. This political backing ensures that regardless of which party holds power, housing remains a commodity instead of a social right, perpetuating evictions and rising rents.

As communities destabilize, politicians and media figures often blame the resulting social issues, such as increased crime and deteriorating living conditions, on the residents. They frame these issues as consequences of residents' choices, like engaging in crime, financial "illiteracy," or having children while poor, rather than addressing the systemic factors that create and perpetuate these conditions. The misleading narratives deflect attention from the role of elite corporate interests and complicit politicians in exacerbating housing crises and social instability.

The truth is more insidious.

Black communities continue to suffer disproportionately because they have been systematically targeted for exploitation and dehumanization since the moment they were kidnapped from Africa, shackled, and packed like cargo in the suffocating holds of slave ships during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Forced into the brutal conditions of chattel slavery, they were commodified for profit, and even after emancipation, they were trapped in exploitative systems like sharecropping. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation, relegating them to second-class citizenship under constant threat of violence. Redlining policies confined them to under-resourced neighborhoods, while mass incarceration funnels Black men and women into prisons, criminalizing their very survival. Predatory lending schemes continue to strip them of homeownership, and ongoing disinvestment in their communities leaves schools underfunded, infrastructure decaying, and opportunities scarce. Targeted policing further terrorizes Black neighborhoods, transforming them into zones of surveillance and control, where safety and justice are elusive.

Through relentless racist propaganda, impoverished Black communities are cast as criminals, as burdens on a system designed to exclude them. The media floods screens with mugshots, politicians call for crackdowns, and corporations profit in silence. The weight of these narratives sinks deep, not just into the minds of those who wield power but into the very people they target. A child watches his mother struggle to find work and grows up believing it’s her failure, not the world’s cruelty. A man is denied housing, then a job, then his freedom, and learns to see himself the way they do—as disposable. Entire generations are ground down beneath the machinery of exploitation, convinced they deserve it. There is no outcry, no reckoning, only the slow erosion of dignity until nothing remains but the suffering that fuels the system.

We must be more vigilant in seeing through these deceptive political tactics. As I write in my book, If Only We Knew, “Of course, these racist ideas of today are nothing new. Black people were blamed for causing their own problems when they were enslaved, once they were freed, and during Jim Crow. Black people have been labeled as criminals, lazy, dangerous, stupid, and sexually promiscuous from the moment they arrived in the colonies of America. Do not be fooled into thinking that the racist ideas of today are not the same as the racist ideas of the past. If you could see how these stereotypes were based on untrue, ignorant, racist ideas in 1857 (the year “separate but equal” was declared the law of the land), in 1963 (the year of the Birmingham church bombing and the subsequent civil rights movement), or even in 1992 (the year Rodney King was infamously brutalized by police officers) you should be able to see that they are still racist ideas today.”

The picture is bleak. The lack of housing stability in poor communities perpetuates a cycle of disruption and instability. Community structures erode. Vulnerability to crime and social disorder increases. The absence of continuous, engaged presence on the streets undermines informal surveillance. Casual interactions and mutual aid, the backbone of the social fabric, are torn apart by relentless evictions and displacement. Perhaps most devastatingly, the destabilization of communities disrupts social networks and erodes trust among residents, making collective action against these injustices more difficult.

The grim reality is that the capitalist system is functioning exactly as intended. It thrives on the exploitation of the many to benefit the few, creating and maintaining conditions that strip people of their dignity, health, and sense of community.

The political and economic framework in place isn't broken, it’s fixed.

It’s meticulously engineered to keep people isolated, struggling, and desperate, ensuring that they are too consumed with survival to realize their collective strength. The relentless erosion of social bonds and the engineered instability are essential features of a system designed to disempower. In this context, the call is not for reform within a corrupt system but for a profound recognition of its true nature.

It’s time to disengage from the illusion that capitalism can be corrected or made to serve the many. There is no such thing as humane capitalism. The phrase is an oxymoron. To support capitalism is to sanction a system built on the backs of the oppressed, where mass suffering fuels the wealth of the few. It’s a machine that grinds human lives into profit, demanding exploitation at every turn.

To reiterate, to back capitalism is to co-sign a social order that obligates crushing the vulnerable, forcing the many to bleed for the luxury of the few. Only by recognizing the logic of capitalism can people begin to see through the distractions, understand the forces at play, and reclaim their power by stepping away from a game rigged against them.

Peter S. Baron (http://www.petersbaron.com)  is the author of “If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society”.