Malcolm Gladwell— What the Dog Saw

Why Problems Like Homelessness May Be Easier to Solve That to Manage

Power Law Distribution— where all the activity in a distribution graph is not in the middle (like a normal distribution) but at one extreme

In the 1980s, when homelessness first surfaced as a national issue, the assumption was that the problem fit a normal distribution: that the vast majority of the homeless were in the same state of semipermanent distress.

Homelessness doesn't have a normal distribution, it has a power-law distribution— 80% of the homeless (in a Philadelphia study) were in and out really quickly (i.e. 1-2 days) and they never came back.

The chronically homeless cost health care and social services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated...In Boston, 119 chronically homeless, over the course of five years, accounted for 18,834 emergency-room visits, accumulating costs of roughly $18 million.

...the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it...Simply running soup kitchens and shelters allows the chronically homeless to remain chronically homeless. You build a shelter and a soup kitchen if you think that homelessness is a problem with a broad and unmanageable middle. But if it's a problem at the fringe it can be solved.

...take homeless policy from the old idea of funding programs that serve homless people endlessly and invest in results that actually end homelessness.

The idea that the sickest and most troubled of the homeless can be stabilized and eventually employed is only a hope. The current philosophy of welfare that government assistance should be temporary and conditional, to avoid creating dependency. But chronically homeless do not respond to disincentives and sanctions (i.e. getting put back out on the street) in a normal way.

Power-law homeless policy has to do the opposite of normal distribution social policy. It should create dependency: you want people who have been outside the system to come inside and rebuild their lives under supervision.

That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn't seem fair. Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. (Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It's simply about efficiency.)

We also believe that the distribution of social benefits should not be arbitrary. We don't give only to some poor mothers, or to a random handful of disabled veterans. We give to everyone who meets a formal criterion, and the moral credibility of government assistance derives, in part, from this universality.

There isn't enough money to go around, and to try to help everyone a little bit— to observe the principle of universality— isn't as cost-effective as helping a few people a lot. Being fair in this case, means providing shelters and soup kitchens, and shelters and soup kitchens don't solve the problem of homelessness.

Our usual moral intuitions are of little use, then, when it comes to a few hard cases. Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.

Solving problems that have power-law distributions doesn't just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political intuitions as well. It's hard not to conclude, in the end, that the reason we treated the homeless as one hopeless undifferentiated group for so long is not simply that we didn't know better. It's that we didn't want to know better. It was easier the old way.

Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching...cost/benefit analysis.