San Francisco is great, but what about the homeless?

We need to blur the boundaries between the tangibles and the intangibles.

Takeaway ideas:

• The real power of good science is in its ability to help the needy
• The need to systematically understand the dynamics of trust

A short walk down east of Hilton San Francisco, is the Union Square, the majestic icon of West Coast’s resilient economy, dotted with the most posh brands and of course electronics. But a short walk west of Hilton, lies a different world. Scores of homeless men and women, stuggling to live by on the streets, begging and coping with addiction and depression. This is not what you expect from a city like San Francisco Bay area, which is hailed to be the Mecca of innovators, and is home to some of the world most influential universities (Stanford, Berkeley and UCSF), and of course headquarters the most influential and admired companies of the world (Google, Apple). We had gathered at Hilton Union Square for the Annual Meeting of The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the main academic body associated with the field of OR and Management Sciences, and researchers and practitioners discussed at length, how to solve several difficult problems, tough to model and solve. People discussed problems as urgent as transmission of Epidemics, to as novel as economics of sharing economy. However looking at the acute homelessness of one of the world’s most prosperous and productive regions, made me wonder what are we as management sciences doing about problems that matter to the most immediate and needy.

For sure, we all are sincere in our efforts about improving things around us, however it is important to focus on what we seek to improve. True, Walmart and Toyota too have their operations problems, but there needs to be a strong dedicated community, that deals with issues of the less efficient social systems. Do we as social scientists have ways to deal with problems as recurring and complex as homelessness, as if we don’t, we have to wonder whether our research is as relevant as we pretend it to be.

One major ingredient lacking in our understanding of social systems, is the ingredient of trust. We still lack a systematic understanding about how trust grows, and often treat it as a black box. However trust is at the core of all social systems, and very often problems like homelessness are an outcome of larger social dilemmas, where we as a society fail to generate enough public goods that can keep a society running. Homelessness is not just a problem of the homeless, it is a social problem that breeds crime and abuse, effecting the welfare of even the most well off.

In our scientific pursuit of measuring everything measurable we sometimes conveniently ignore things that are intangible but nonetheless are equally important, for example a sense of community. Our profession faces an elephant in the room, of ignoring important intangibles, and continuing our pursuit of solving problems by making unrealistic assumptions about them. A sense of community is hard to measure, but nonetheless it can have an impact on the ability to galvanise resources, something very tangible and relevant for quantitative fields. We need to start blurring the lines between the tangible and intangible if we want to break new frontiers of research, and act as social scientists of real significance tackling the grim problems of 21st century.

It is great that the methods we develop power search algorithms used around the world and explain the dynamics of innovation, but the real power of our work lies in our ability to help the real needy.