Will the Saints go marching back in?

In Slate, Josh Levin mourns the loss of his hometown city: New Orleans seems more like a scene out of 28 Days Later than a place where people ever lived and worked and raised their families. A little more than 48 hours after Katrina strafed the city, I’m starting to mourn a place that’s not ...

By Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

September 2, 2005, 4:55 AM

In Slate, Josh Levin mourns the loss of his hometown city:

New Orleans seems more like a scene out of 28 Days Later than a place where people ever lived and worked and raised their families. A little more than 48 hours after Katrina strafed the city, I’m starting to mourn a place that’s not quite dead but seems too stricken to go on living.

Also in Slate, Daniel Gross posits that the national economic effect of Katrina could be more devastating than the 9/11 attacks. Kieran Healy has two posts worth reading about the magnitude of the social disaster. If there is any comfort that can be taken at this point from Katrina’s aftereffects, it’s in this story by Michael Phillips and Cynthia Cossen in the Wall Street Journal: cities beset by catastrophic attacks refuse to fade away:

At the close of World War II, American bombers incinerated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic weapons. Within two decades, both cities had been rebuilt, and their populations had surpassed prewar levels. The lesson, according to economists who have studied the question, is that, while it may take years, cities are resilient and usually bounce back from the worst natural or man-made devastation. “Even nuclear bombs and fire bombing of cities was not enough to change the level and nature of economic activity,” says Columbia University economist Donald R. Davis, who studied Japanese reconstruction. “People don’t abandon their cities, and indeed industries don’t abandon the cities they’re in.” Such large-scale disasters are rare, of course, but a look back at four of them in the U.S. — as New Orleans copes with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — reinforces that conclusion: Americans are loath to surrender their cities despite the threat of an array of biblical plagues.

Read the whole thing.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

Tag: Economics