Million-Dollar Murray and the Hockey Stick

There is a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell (2006), Million-Dollar Murray, that I have heard referenced a couple of times over the last couple of months.

The observations in this article are informing policy and program development on homelessness in the U.S., crime prevention and community safety in Saskatchewan, and health in Ontario.

Some snippets to entice you to read the article:

• “Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage.”
• “…you do not manage a social wrong.  You should be ending it.”
• “We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem.  We cannot do both.”
• “Solving problems that have power-law distributions (this is where the hockey stick reference comes in) doesn’t just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political intuitions as well.”