(:)(:)(:)(:)(:) Five Snouts Up for Solvable podcast by Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg.
with many new progressive officials starting work at the local level around the country in the next few weeks, maybe it’s a good time to reboot and refresh our own internal belief systems. Many of us feel anxiety or cynicism around the array of big problems facing the world at all levels: the growing gap between the rich and the poor (which intersects with racism, sexism, homelessness, climate crisis, migration and many other issues) chief among them. The state of the world and politics today can foster a sense of hopelessness and despair.
The podcast Solvable dwells, as one of its founders journalist Jacob Weisberg calls it, at the intersection of expertise and optimism instead of negativity and ignorance.
My favorite example so far is their interview with Rosanne Haggerty of Community Solutions on solving homelessness. Haggerty describes how focusing on what is really going on with specificity at the local community level like in New Orleans and Utah has led to a complete reduction of homelessness (literally going from a known X to zero on the number of people without homes).
Haggerty details how fostering radical coordination between all the actual humans with access to information, funding or political channels that could provide housing has turned this problem from something that causes despair and cynicism to actually solving it.
Actually.
solving.
it.
Take that in for a second.
The solution doesn’t involve tent cities or building giant shelters over community opposition. The solution is actual funding for actual housing. And it turns out there’s more than enough money in the system to do it. There’s no reason any veteran, for example, ever has to be homeless. The problem there is one of lack of coordination of resources.
I look forward to listening to the rest of the podcast. From reading about the podcast and watching this short interview with its founders i get the sense that understanding something with specificity is the key to real solutions. Often in my spiritual circles we prefer to gloss over specifics and just “visualize” a solution. This podcast, dwelling as it does at the “intersection of expertise and optimism,” requires both.
