Malcolm Gladwell has a New Yorker article currently online that provides new insight into the homeless and other issues and the whole way we understand and react to social problems.
One brief excerpt from this especially informative article:
The homelessness problem is like the L.A.P.D.’s bad-cop problem. It’s a matter of a few hard cases, and that’s good news, because when a problem is that concentrated you can wrap your arms around it and think about solving it. The bad news is that those few hard cases are hard. They are falling-down drunks with liver disease and complex infections and mental illness. They need time and attention and lots of money. But enormous sums of money are already being spent on the chronically homeless, and Culhane saw that 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. Murray Barr used more health-care dollars, after all, than almost anyone in the state of Nevada. It would probably have been cheaper to give him a full-time nurse and his own apartment.
Read Gladwell’s article and it will change your thinking on the homeless, police violence and smog-control.
“It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.???