After getting off of Skype with Brian ealier this morning, I started reading an article (Million-Dollar Murray) he sent me from earlier. The article is so fricking long that I had to break it up and read it thoughout the day. But it was more than worth the time it took to read. I haven’t read a powerful article like this in such a long time.
It started with a powerful story of a homeless man, Murray, an ex-marine, whose medical bills came out to an estimated million dollars over the years he’d been homeless. Quite simply, for the sake of economics, maybe it’s cheaper to just solve the homeless problem than to ignore it. But then on the ethical stand point, simply treating the homeless issue as an economic problem is almost immoral and unfair (unfair to those who work three jobs to put their kids through school but still makes too much to qualify for social services). And politicians on both sides don’t want to touch this issue precisely because of that — Republicans want to be fair, and the Democrats want to treat the issue with more dignity.
The article is broken up into five parts. If you don’t have time, at least read part one and part five to get a closure to Murray’s story. But if you can spare 20 minutes, the article will enlighten you on the issues of homelessness, economics and politics (and even pollution) in a way that you’d never thought about before.
.
.
.
For those who have been in at least an Econ 101 class can probably still recall why rent control actually puts more people out on the street. The same reason applies to the very basic question as to why millions of people still live in hunger EVERYDAY even though there’s an over abundance of food collectively in the world. I used to think Economics is such a dull subject, but my instructor constantly attaches a human face to every single concept we learn in class, making each theory we learn unforgetable. The more I learn about the truths of how the world operates through the goggles of economics, the more frustrated I am about how the system operates. Malcolm Gladwell puts it best in the article:
Our usual moral intuitions are little use, then, when it comes to a few hard cases [referring to the hardest cases of the homeless people]. 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.
* Power-law is a systematic way to prioritize solving social issues using economics. We take care of the people who cost the system most resources first and then others later. This is what causes outcry from people who think this methodology is unfair.
Harsh realities versus principles of our ethics. What a predicament.