Once again, we read a depressing and disturbing article. There’s almost a sick humor in that, efforts to make minority and poor populations move out of concentrated areas only made things way worse for the overall areas. Basically, AIDS spread and housing overcrowding made safety even less possible to maintain. However, when I detach from the situation and look at it without thinking of it in terms of real people in places so close to us, I actually find the way things work quite fascinating. Simply put, once something bad happens, it only leads to more bad things to follow. For example, people living in a building suffer from AIDS and this can lead landlords to abandon the buildings in poor neighborhoods. Or, people flee from a place, but then it leads to overcrowding in another place…
What actually interests me most is the fact that so many complicated mathematical formulas are used in this article. This might be because I like math. I always think of topics such as this one as being totally about opinions, facts and simple statistics and correlations, trying to solve one of the many problems in the world. I haven’t even tried to understand the formulas in the article, especially those starting on page 22, but I kind of like how these human trends can be understood with straight formulas, rather than just a bunch of people brainstorming different ideas.
