Malcolm Gladwell’s latest piece in the New Yorker is super-interesting! He talks about “power-law” distributions, which in a lot of ways are akin to the maxim “One bad apple spoils the bunch.” In other words, social issues that we might *assume* are broadly based and pretty much intractable, are in fact much more concentrated (and therefore solvable) than we might think.
His central example is homelessness. Most cities offer some kind of assistance to the homeless, providing shelters and soup kitchens, and in some cases job training and other counseling. In spite of this, the number of panhandlers and drunks sleeping in doorways remains pretty much constant. The standard “American” attitude in response to this is that some people are just “lazy” or “shiftless” and that nothing is going to change that. Furthermore, there are so many people in the “system” that it would be impossible to help them all. After looking into some studies and speaking with some police officers who deal with the homeless on a daily basis, Gladwell finds that the situation is really quite a bit different. Most people are homeless for incredibly brief periods, and make every effort to avoid returning to the shelters once they get back on their feet. It is a small-ish group of chronically homeless (often mentally or physically disabled) who consume the majority of public aid, especially when it comes to the medical treatment they often receive at the government’s expense. It has been speculated that by addressing these cases directly, the overall cost and impact of homelessness could be drastically reduced.
Sounds great, but there is a problem with this approach. Studies have proven that the most effective way of “addressing” certain of these cases is simply to give a chronically homeless person a place to live, regardless of their ability to pay or even their willingness to try to improve their situation. From a purely cost-benefits analysis, it turns out to be much cheaper to give a person a single room apartment for a year, and to monitor their health & etc. than it is to house them at a shelter and cover the medical costs attributable to their living on the street. Furthermore, by taking this approach, the visibility of homelessness in major cities could be largely eliminated, or so the theory goes, because when people speak of the homeless “problem” they are really referring to this group in particular, and not those who just pass through the system before re-building their lives.
However, for obvious reasons, this approach doesn’t sit very well in the American mind. Why should the worst offenders be given the best treatment? And how do we decide who the “worst” offenders are anyway? It seems less fair than just giving the same treatment to everyone. Gladwell offers another example that is a bit easier to stomach perhaps. According to some studies, “Five per cent of the vehicles on the road produce fifty-five per cent of the automobile pollution.” And yet, American emissions testing tends to treat all vehicles as equal-opportunity offenders, despite the fact that most new cars run so cleanly that they might as well be hybrids! Many other countries enforce terribly stringent registration and maintenence requirements on older cars, but again there is a mental block in the US psyche when it comes to addressing these issues effectively.
Anyway, I think I’ve summarized things enough here. Go ahead and read the article if you want the whole story. And you can check out Gladwell’s other recent bit on Pit Bulls and racial profiling too!