Oh my goodness, I'm getting bad at this blogging thing. 

Grad school is crazy hectic, with tons of reading and papers and field trips (yes, you read that right). 

We talk a lot about public policy and how research can inform it, and today we were talking about the 100,000 Homes campaign, which set out to get 100,000 people off the streets. Research shows that it's easier to tend to people's other needs once they're housed and that subsidizing housing costs less in taxes than paying for emergency room visits and other services for the homeless, so they decided to just get them off the streets and worry about everything else later. In Nashville, they went out, found all the chronically homeless people they could in the city, interviewed them about their health, then ranked them according to who was at most risk for dying and got as many as possible off the streets immediately and into housing. The program overall has housed more than 101,000 people and after it ends at the end of July, they're starting a new zero campaign to target individual cities one at a time to end homelessness completely in each city. It sounds really promising, and 85% of the people they get into housing stay there successfully, which is a higher success rate than just about any program ever. 

Of course, people in my class started arguing about what the neighbors would think and whether we should be helping people who are only on the streets because they are ex-cons with substance abuse problems. And one girl said that they almost certainly had troubled childhoods, so those problems really weren't their fault.

I said it didn't matter whether it was their fault. They were human beings and if they were willing to accept help and we are able to give help (which it seems we are, given the effectiveness so far of this program), then we should help them. Regardless of their past. We shouldn't abandon anyone to die on the streets if we have the means to prevent it.

And my professor fussed at me for making an impassioned speech and told me that we had to consider science and leave feelings out of it.

My only question is, "Why can't we have both? Why can't we be compassionate and be guided by science in terms of what works?" A lot of policy makers want science to give us the answers to not just what we should do but why we should do it. Housing people is an economically sound decision. It saves taxpayer dollars. It makes the streets safer, promotes cohesiveness, reduces crime, etc. But what if we just stopped and said, people are people. And we should love human beings and promote their overall well-being no matter what. People should be our first priority (second only to God). We can use science to determine some of the ways in which people's brains work and how situations affect people's abilities to use their proper judgment or to exercise their free will. We can look at risk factors. We can find solutions. We can develop programs that work. But to try to throw out love and human empathy as motivators is insane. Public policy guided only by science does not help people. It ignores people and categorizes them as statistics or variables. And in today's world, we desperately need love.

I'm praying for you!

:)