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Ian Ayres to indebted graduates: buy stocks on margin!
Archive for the ‘Post-disaster reflections’ Category
November 20th, 2010
October 5th, 2010
Obion County, Tennessee is a rural patch with eight towns in it, each of which has a fire department supported by local taxes. If you live in one of these towns, and your house catches fire, your neighbors put out the fire through the agency of the fire department. Some people prefer to live out [...]
June 26th, 2010
Once upon a time, writers and pols gathered in physical places nominally devoted to consumption of ethanol and chemicals with names ending in -ine, including but not limited to caff- and nicot- , and engaged in social capital formation, sharpening of wits, and exchange of information that made them all smarter and happier. Some of [...]
January 18th, 2010
Category: Disasters, Economics, Haiti, Organizing, Political Science, Politics and Leadership, Post-disaster reflections
Haiti is not doomed. To the extent that Haitian culture inhibits prosperity, Haitians will do as people in that condition always have: they will work around their culture—or leave it, and benefit their home countries no less by doing that.
January 18th, 2010
Category: Disasters, Organizing, Political Science, Politics and Leadership, Post-disaster reflections
I’ve been waiting for this story ever since the earthquake. It turns out the rich folks up on the hill are pretty much OK, and they are being protected from looters as always by the police who have been invisible to date down among the poor. Haiti is a society operating under rules called amoral [...]
September 19th, 2008
Category: Post-disaster reflections
Newshour tonight had a piece on rebuilding the electric infrastructure trashed by Ike. It began with a family in an undamaged suburban house almost a week after the storm, using candles and a camping stove for cooking. Interestingly, the housewife interviewed illustrated her main gripe as wondering every day where and whether they can get [...]
October 24th, 2007
Category: Post-disaster reflections
This morning, as California’s wildfires continued to burn, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff declared that the feds had learned many lessons from Hurricane Katrina. Maybe. By nearly all accounts, the fires have been extraordinarily well managed (400,000 plus acres have been torched, nearly a million people have been evacuated, but only a handful of deaths [...]
August 8th, 2007
Now that the wreckage of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis is no longer all over our screens, it’s worth considering what the episode should teach us about infrastructure, public policy, politics, and engineering. Part of the answer is, not much: it’s very tricky to interpret rare and exciting events. This one, recognizing that any accidental [...]
August 2nd, 2007
The I-35W bridge was two arch-cantilever trusses, with smaller trusses parallel to the river supporting the roadway. Each of the main trusses rested on two concrete columns, one on each side of the river. The design highlights a characteristic design tradeoff: a truss like this is statically determinate, which means that the all the forces [...]
