Lessons learned from the aftermath of Katrina…there are, I’m sure, many lessons to be learned. But one thought in particular struck me, and I figured it was worth a little more exploration. It is really an extension of my concern about the continuing viability of cities.
By living in a city, in the kind of civilisation we live in, we are handing over responsibility for a lot of aspects of our lives to other people. I cannot grow enough food to survive in my garden, I have to pay someone else to provide food for me. The same with the many services that keep a city running, electricity, water, garbage collection, even clothing and education, all of them benefit from economies of scale to the extent that it isn’t viable for anyone who lives in a town or city to provide for themselves.
Thats all OK while the basic fabric of society holds everything together – the capital system we have supports this kind living with market forces pushing up prices of things that are scarce or need a lot of manpower to produce and bringing them back down to the point where people are prepared to pay for them. We’re all used to this system no matter how much we consider it inequitable.
What holds this system together? There are distribution mechanisms for physical things, like food, which rely upon a common infrastructure. This infrastructure, in Britain at least, and I suspect most places around the world, is provided by the government. We are reliant upon their ability to maintain that infrastructure in working order.
One of the things that happened in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago was that the infrastructure was incapacitated en masse, across the entire city. That caused the distribution mechanisms to fail.
The people of the city are reliant on the infrastructure, without it they cannot obtain the things they need, they have to find a way to obtain those things. One way, in the NO example, would be to leave the city, go and stay elsewhere. Another would be to stock up beforehand, though that may be less practical in the those particular circumstances. There will always be those who cannot, for whatever reason, provide for themselves in these situations, they must be helped somehow, by reinstating the infrastructure upon which they (indirectly) rely, or by delivering the things that would normally be delivered via the infrastructure. If they don’t receive that help they become desperate – if its a matter of survival what happens to your morals?
There are two significant factors contributing to the rapid decivilisation of NO. Drugs and governmental inpreparedness. If you’ve got a city full of addicts looking for their next hit and a government that is unable to get the city back to its normal functioning quickly you’re going to end up with problems.
What are the consequences? There are a number of ways it could play out – one suggestion has been that Bush is not going to loose any sleep over the dead, since they’re mostly voting for the opposition anyway. But what if FEMA was upset at its underfunding? Why not use this as a means of highlighting just how badly things have been handled over the last few years by making sure the relief efforts are disorganised?
But its probably worse than that – the world is looking on, asking itself “is this the freedom we want here?”, increasingly the answer to that question is going to be no, its a freedom that places the values of business higher than the values of people. This is comes from being run by economists – its much easier to measure money than suffering, concern, happiness or any of the other kinds of things people feel.
What have we learned?
Lesson 1 – civilisation falls apart very quickly given the right circumstances
Lesson 2 – it is possible to insulate yourself to some extent from this kind of disaster
Lesson 3 – none of this happens in isolation
I’m only being philosophical ‘cos I couldn’t install Settlers 3 on XP
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