[gyardley]

Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis.

What a bizarre thing for Gladwell to write. He's inexplicably generalized from one particular power-law solution, giving free apartments to the chronically homeless, to state that all power-law solutions are politically unpalatable.

In the case of the tiny minority of excessively violent LAPD officers - a simple power-law solution would just be to assign them to useful administrative jobs. I can't really see how that particular power-law solution would aggravate the right or the left.

[yummyfajitas]

That solution would aggravate people who view the police as being part of their "tribe". Assigning some police officers to admin work lowers their status, and in effect the status of your entire tribe. This would aggravate authoritarians on both the right (e.g. Gonzales) and left (e.g. Biden).

This is also the objection to giving free stuff to the homeless - it elevates the status of another tribe (do-gooders/bleeding hearts, the people handing out the free stuff) at the expense of your tribe (hard working/god fearing).

You could almost certainly get conservatives behind such a plan and get liberals to oppose it, if you did it in a way that elevated the status of a right-leaning tribe (e.g., boot camp/military living for the homeless).

[DaniFong]

Malcolm Gladwell isn't alone in suggesting that the solutions to power-law type problems, which usually require focussing on small parts of the problem rather than making sweeping changes, are unpalatable to government. Jane Jacobs, in the Economy of Cities, suggests the same thing. However, she suggests it's due to the desire of government people to want to cause change rapidly: sweeping changes provide this promise in a way that spot changes might not.