My colleague Tyler Cowen will have a series of columns this week published at Slate.com on the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina. Tyler makes the interesting argument that much of the devastated area should be rebuilt, but as shantytowns.
As readers of this site will know, I am heading up a project on Katrina at the Mercatus Center (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here) that is focusing on three dimension of social transformation --- civil society and social capital; political economy and governance; entrepreneurship and cities. At the intellectual level this project represents a variety of intellectual arbitrage opportunities: Lachmann and Putnam; Hayek and Tullock; Kirzner and Jane Jacobs. For example, in rethinking the rebuilding of New Orelans Jacob's ideas about dense cities and the role of commerceical life are extremely relevant (and don't contradict the Cowen thesis about shantytowns on the edge of the city).
Katrina unfortunately has provided economists and public policy analysts with a 'natural experiment' in which nature's fury enables us to study both the folly of man (due to both his hubris and incompetence) and the capacity of human beings to stare adversity in the face and fight it back with the ultimate resource --- the human imagination.
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