Should We Embrace Power-Law Policies?

Three years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a long article in The New Yorker about permanent supportive housing - the social program that houses and provides social services the chronically homeless, often mentally ill - in which he explained the power-law theory behind the policy.  I personally like designing policies around power-law distributions, even as it challenges our notions of universalism - equality of opportunity and social support for all, that is.

From the Gladwell piece:

Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. “We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really quickly,” he said...The next ten per cent were what Culhane calls episodic users. They would come for three weeks at a time, and return periodically, particularly in the winter. They were quite young, and they were often heavy drug users. It was the last ten per cent—the group at the farthest edge of the curve—that interested Culhane the most. They were the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problem—the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridges—it’s this group that we have in mind.

The economic rationale behind permanent supportive housing is that these users are the most expensive on the system, and that if you house them, existing resources - the shelter system, for example - can better serve the remaining episodic and acute users.  Yesterday, the NYT ran an editorial endorsing a similar approach to curb high school dropouts.

I personally think this approach is a good one, as many social problems have a chronic population that requires and deserves an on-going, deeper level of service and care.  Few of the women and children on public assistance are on it for years, but there is a small subset that our time-limited policy of the last decade just does not serve (never mind that the overall policy is punitive).

In our country we strive for this ideal of universalism, despite the reality that race, gender, ability, geography, etc. make life and the policies we design quite unequal.  If you're temporarily collecting public assistance or requiring food stamps, our current set up should work just fine for you.  It's a stop gap measure that can come through in a pinch.  But if you are chronically homeless, suffering from schizophrenia, perhaps, or a kid in an abysmal school district that just cannot improve on its current resource allocation, then there's an argument to be made to providing long-term, different levels of subsidy and support to these outsized drains on the overall system.

What do you think?

(Photo of homeless person in San Francisco by Franco Folini)