Million Dollar Murray Analysis

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I have read and reviewed another article by Malcolm Gladwell, seeing as the majority of his articles correlate strongly with sociology. The article is titled Million Dollar Murray – Why Problems Like Homelessness May Be Easier to Solve Than to Manage, from a 2006 edition of The New Yorker. The star of the piece is Murray Barr, a large and personable homeless man. Murray drinks heavily, and though he’s a rude and violent drunk his overall friendly persona makes up for it. It’s not uncommon for him to be picked up multiple times in the same evening by the police, and he’s on a first name basis with all of the hospital staff. Barr is more than capable of being self-sufficient. He has both a military and culinary background, but lacks the self-control…show more content…
The annual price to house and monitor: $15,000 per year, versus upwards of a million. Obviously this presents quite the ethical dilemma. I, for one, am very conflicted about this topic. We are certainly in a financial crisis right now, and if a quick way to gain back a few million bucks is staring us straight in the face, it’s pretty hard to ignore. I also see further than the pure monetary aspect, and think that if we’ve discovered a valid way to keep the chronically homeless stable and off the street it also deserves some attention. The article put an emphasis on how many of these men worked very well within a strict system, but hadn’t mastered complete independence. The cons weigh equally heavily. What message does this send – that the less we try, the more we gain? And who is to be deemed so unfit that they deserve these amenities? My father was unemployed for three years, and my mother couldn’t work due to a disability, and we probably would have been offended had we found out there was a program in place to house and accommodate citizens because they weren’t

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