Today I was with 75 formerly homeless young women, mostly mothers, who analyzed the causes of homelessness and developed action plans to address it. (I was one of several facilitators of their discussions.) They were struck by the fact that the state of Massachusetts spends $47,000 per year for each family in a shelter, for a total shelter budget of $113 million last year. But the average housing voucher that allows the recipients to stay in their own home costs the state just $7,200 per year. It would seem that by paying for permanent housing, the state could spread $113 million around a lot more poor people and improve their welfare. (Staying in shelters is linked to educational, health, and mental-health problems.) Recognizing this situation, the federal stimulus bill provides money for “Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing” as an alternative to shelter.

The women I worked with were very well-informed and smart about analyzing this issue. They saw various aspects and problems–and they asked tough questions about who benefits from the existing system, which they find indefensible. But I have my own theory about why the current system exists and will be hard to change.

Entering a shelter is something people try very hard to avoid. That puts a lid on how many people seek shelter–only the very desperate. On the other hand, many people would like–and, in my opinion, deserve–$7,200 in subsidies. If people could get subsidies by demonstrating need and a risk of homelessness, lots of people would qualify, and the state would have high costs. Instead, we are willing to spend $47,000 for each family that ends up in shelter, knowing that it is such an unpleasant experience that people will do anything they can to avoid it.

It’s exactly like the old workhouses of Victorian England–you have a right to food and shelter, but you have to suffer and be degraded to get it.

Over the winter break, I finally read Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Its virtues include good stories, a clear and accessible–rather aphoristic–style, relevant application of social theories (including Coase’s theory of the firm, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and social capital) and balanced value-judgments. The basic phenomenon that interests Shirky is the dramatic fall in the cost and difficulty of organizing groups. Shirky recognizes that this change is not all for the good, but he argues that its effects are already profound. “Our principal challenge is not deciding where we want to go, but rather in staying upright as we go there. The invention of tools that facilitate group formation is less like ordinary technological change, and more like an event, something that has already happened. As a result, the important questions aren’t about whether these tools will spread and reshape society, but rather how they do so” (p. 307-8).

I get the theoretical argument and find the examples persuasive, even exciting. But I am still struck by how little change has actually occurred so far. Maybe we are in a formative period and about to see some really big shifts. I don’t see them yet.

Easy group formation should allow people to create valuable goods without organizing themselves into firms with costly overhead (HR departments, legal offices, executive suites). We should therefore see economic growth, with the engine being informal networks, like the programmers who create and refine Linux or the volunteers who build Wikipedia. Indeed, these are valuable and fascinating goods. Yet the last decade was one of the worst in the economic history of the United States. And the chief corporate rival of Linux, Microsoft, remains the third most profitable company in the whole country, with $17.68 billion in profits in 2008. I suppose you could argue that we don’t count GDP correctly because goods like Wikipedia aren’t priced. But it’s evident that the economy is worse off, overall, than it was 10 years ago.

Easy group formation should have political effects; it should weaken authoritarian regimes and expand freedom of association, even under duress. One of Shirky’s examples is the campaign to bring down President Alexander Lukashenko, dictator of Belarus. Its most remarkable and innovative feature has been its use of flashmobs. People assemble for harmless activities like eating ice cream, and the government arrests them because it cannot tolerate organized assemblies. That is a fascinating development–but Lukashenko is still firmly in charge four years after the flashmobs began in Belarus. I devoutly hope that the Green Revolution in Iran will be more successful, but if it is, I think the cause will be a split in the clergy, not just the availability of Twitter and Flickr.

Easy group formation should have sociological effects, making people feel less isolated and more trusting. Yet according to the General Social Survey, the proportion of Americans who feel they can generally trust others fell from 46% in 1972 to 32% in 2008. The decline has been fairly smooth and steady, and 2008 was the worst year on record.

The one really profound change that has already happened is the decline of metropolitan daily newspapers in the United States, caused by Craiglist and eBay. That’s a perfect illustration of Shirky’s thesis: individuals have been able to avoid the overhead costs (and profit margins) of the newspaper industry by selling directly to one another. So far, the net effects of that change seem bad to me–we have lost our main way of financing journalism. I can well imagine that we will end in a better place, with news peer-produced by citizens. Again, I don’t believe we’re there yet, and progress seems far from assured.

Just a few days before Dr. Martin Luther King was killed, he said: “It is always a rich and rewarding experience to take a brief break from our day-to-day demands and the struggle for freedom and human dignity and discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned friends of goodwill all over our nation.”

We have lost Dr. King, but we must continue the discussion. Many people are choosing to conduct service activities on Martin Luther King Day, which falls on Jan. 18th this year. Service is best when it involves reflection. Volunteers can meet to choose their issues and plan their service. After a service activity, they can reflect about what they have learned and what they should do next. Such discussions turn ordinary service events into powerful opportunities for learning, analyzing issues, forming human connections, and addressing serious, long-term problems.

Last year, the member groups of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium , which specialize in public discussions, created a guide for conversations to accompany service on Martin Luther King Day. Public Agenda Foundation and Everyday Democracy played leading roles in creating this guide. We have updated it a bit for 2010.

The guide is available for any group that wants to combine discussion with service on Martin Luther King Day. I am circulating it now and encouraging people and organizations to plan on using it in time for Jan. 18–although it is appropriate for any other day as well.

We are off to Macon, Georgia for the holiday. I am going to take a break from writing and reading blogs until next week. Meanwhile, today (Tuesday) is the official release date of my latest book, Reforming the Humanities: Literature and Ethics from Dante through Modern Times, available from Amazon and elsewhere. You could always ask your library or bookstore to order a copy!

There is no lobby for the kind of civic reform we need today, which would address both the formal processes of government (things like campaign finance and congressional procedures) and the capacities and organization of citizens. The earlier generation of civic organizations–like my first employer, Common Cause–still try to reform government, but they can no longer count on citizens to support their advocacy or to make use of the reforms they advocate. For example, disclosing federal data will do no good if citizens can’t use these data to hold officials accountable. The information will simply be exploited by sensation-seeking reporters, professional lobbyists, and strong partisans.

But there is good news. Hundreds of thousands of Americans–maybe a couple of million–have done work that I consider part of the solution to our problems as a democracy. They have participated in local, deliberative discussions organized by the National Issues Forums, Everyday Democracy, AmericaSpeaks, or homegrown alternatives; or they have led kids in interactive civic courses or programs that combine research, discussion, and service; or they have volunteered through strong AmeriCorps programs; or they have created and managed online spaces for sharing news and information; or they have sustained important local civic institutions like libraries and meeting spaces; or they have collaborated with government agencies to restore watersheds; or they have organized neighborhoods, using techniques that include a lot of listening and open discussion.

Nobody has organized these people, asking them to meet one another, share ideas, collaborate, discuss a national agenda (including policy reforms), or contribute money to the common cause. Most of the organizations that support this kind of work can’t afford to do grassroots canvassing or fundraising, nor do they advocate for reforms. Almost all of the money that supports these national organizations comes from a few foundations, plus some specialized endowments.

I wonder if one national organization with credibility and capacity–or else a small coalition of such organizations–could do the organizing footwork. The other groups would share their lists on the condition that they took a large share of any funds raised. The extra money could be used to support the civic lobbying function that is otherwise missing.