New Orleans's recovery five years on from Katrina is a harbinger of how climate change will drive a thicker wedge between the haves and the have-nots, says John Mutter.
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Mutter, J. Disasters widen the rich–poor gap. Nature 466, 1042 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/4661042a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/4661042a
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Mark Fletcher
Do we know that Katrina was the result of human-caused climate change? No. Do we know that climate change will increase the disparity between rich and poor countries? No. This is a confused conflation of ideological issues, based on absolutely no evidence.
Firstly, why is the disparity between rich and poor countries relevant at all? What matters is to minimize the harm to people from disasters. The disparity only seems to be relevant if you are laboring under the delusion that global economic development is zero-sum, and that rich country wealth has somehow come at the expense of poor countries. This is nonsense: rich country development has benefited poor countries through trade, local aid and technology transfer, and these benefits are likely to massively outweigh the cost of adapting to climate change caused by rich country development.
If policy makers wanted to make Katrina into an opportunity, they should not have continued to subsidize population of New Orleans.
Everything written here supports the idea that an excellent way to reduce the impact of natural disasters is to maximize economic development. This means no more aid to governments, which achieves nothing and may well be harmful. This means advocating pro-growth policies, not Western European-style net-harm regulation and arbitrary redistribution. And this means no pitiful attempts to reduce carbon emissions that will have no effect on global temperatures according to our best models but will reduce economic growth by trillions of dollars.
Finally, poor regulation of the financial system was not an underlying cause of the financial slump, contrary to what politicians of both parties have claimed. Most economists of integrity will tell you that the causes of the crisis were the loose monetary policy of the Federal Reserve and federal government guarantees of mortgage lending. This is why the recent financial legislation is both dishonest and harmful.
Everything written here suggests that rich country policy makers have little to teach poorer countries. They have repeatedly both invited disasters and reacted to them in harmful ways.
shad ock
This analysis is quite interesting but could have been more complete by making comparison between different policies at different epochs. These effects of disasters are well developed in the Naomi Klein's book "the shock doctrine". And the introduction is talking about Katrina and and the policies followed by US government.
Soon after the disaster, Milton Friedman had the same kind of argumentation as in this article saying that this disaster would be a chance to rebuild and adopt new policies. He argue (for example) that a good way to reconstruct a better and stronger scholar system would be to privatize schools.
These methods are well known and developed since years to permit to private companies to make lots of money rebuilding and opening new markets that was took in charge by the public before the disaster.
For the 2004 Tsunami (for example) the reconstruction was fast but it was tourist hotels etc... and villages of fishers were reconstruct 10km inside of the land, letting whit sand beach for the tourists. It is very profitable, but hadn't permit to local populations to increase their standard living.
The example of Alaska is quite interesting since, it's before the beginning policies applied since the seventies after disaster or politic troubles in different countries around the world. At this time Keynesian policy applied by states might had permit to rebuild faster and better than now.
It should be an interesting research to compare the impact of the different policies applied since (for example) 1950 to see which policies really permit to improve the living conditions of the population. Adding to this, it should be nice to compare the impact of the disaster with the debt (in percentage of the GDP) of different countries and the percentage of the GDP invested in public policies (schools, health, etc...). The countries with a larger debt can't afford health care or school system, they don't have engineer to reconstruct, they don't have Doctors, etc... So the "debt politic" followed by international institution are probably increasing the effect of disasters (as explain in this article) on the poorest countries.
thanks for these brief but clear study.