Malcolm Gladwell on Poverty

I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s book What the Dog Saw. The book is a collection of his articles and he has an interesting article on poverty called “Million Dollar Murray” in which he examines traditional approaches to fighting poverty and how little impact they are having. He writes that the prevailing opinion is that poverty and homelessness are distributed along a bell curve distribution and that the “the vast majority of the homeless were in the same state of semipermanent distress” (183). The argument continues that with so many continually homeless, what good could be done?

Several studies, though, revealed that homelessness has a power-law distribution, where all the activity is not in the middle but at one extreme (182). Sioux Falls is one of now several cities that has bought this argument and is concentrating its homeless efforts by taking the most chronic cases off of the streets, giving them an apartment, and surrounding them with tools and resources to make it off of the streets. While building apartments and staffing these initiatives is expensive, it is also expensive every time a homeless person goes into detox at the jail, or uses the emergency room, or other public services. Taxpayers end up paying the bill one way or the other, and while to some it doesn’t seem right to give a chronic middle-aged drunk a furnished apartment, it’s proving not only to work but also save taxpayers some money. A win-win scenario, right?

Not so fast. Gladwell writes “from an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn’t seem fair. Thousands of people in the Denver area no doubt live day to day, work two or three jobs, and are eminently deserving of a helping hand- and no one offers them the key to a new apartment. Yet that’s just what the guy screaming obscenities and swigging Dr. Tich gets. When the welfare mom’s time on public assistance runs out, we cut her off. Yet when the homeless man trashes his apartment, we give him another (191). Gladwell continues “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 of Chicago school cost-benefit analysis (197). It’s fascinating stuff and another reminder of how tangled and difficult it can be to make progress on these issues.