This third post by Megan McArdle is really a direct response to Maria, but more of as serious of observations that I think Rambi will find particularly interesting (given her background in social work) and contains observations that all of us ought to consider, if we haven't before.
Perish the poor
For all that I cringed in reading the self-satisfied proclamation that the Katrina disaster is the inevitable result of American's political sins, I do think that the catastrophe has a lot to do with poverty. But as I said in my previous post, I think that the interaction of the poverty with the hurricane to produce a social disaster is extremely complicated.
The problem of the poor is that the poor have more than one problem. In America, in these days, people who don't have more than one problem usually don't end up being poor. The poor lack education; they lack robust networks of family and friends to weather them through a crisis; they lack resources to draw on in emergencies, and yes, conservatives, they lack middle-class behaviours that could help pull them out of the underclass. We saw all of those things operating in New Orleans.
The poor, because they were uneducated, did not understand as readily as the middle-class that fled that this time, it was really a good idea to evacuate, even though the last seven times you evacuated nothing happened.
The poor lived on the lower ground, where flooding was worse, because housing that tends to flood is cheaper than housing that stays dry.
The poor did not know anyone with a boat they could call when the water started to rise.
The poor did not have any far-flung family, spread around the country by the modern educational and professional employment system, to stay with outside of New Orleans. Many of the refugees have reported that this is the first time they've left the city.
The poor did not have any money to stay in a motel, because it was the end of the month (government checks come on the first of the month) and the pay period (which generally spans two weeks), and few poor people have savings.
The poor were less likely to have cars, or know people with access to cars. They are less likely to be connected with churches or other social organisations that could have functioned to make sure they got out.
The poor do not listen to news as frequently, or as intently, as the middle class, meaning that they had a much hazier idea of what was going on, even if they had had the education to understand what a Class Five hurricane was.
The poor were angry about the divide between them and the middle class, particularly since the middle class is mostly white, and the underclass is mostly poor. When the refugee relief efforts broke down, the belief that they were being targeted because they were black seems to have led to violent and anti-social behavior.
Those with behaviour problems and anti-social personalities tend to be poor. (This is not to say that poor people all have behaviour problems: all rabbis are jewish, but that doesn't mean that all, or even a majority, of jewish people are rabbis). When the middle-class fled the city, the concentration of the dangerous among the population rose precipitously.
The poor had nowhere to put their pets (they were not allowed in the Superdome), leading many to stay with their animals rather than abandon them. Middle class people who went to motels or friends didn't have this problem.
The poor are vastly less responsive to public education efforts than the middle class (I've seen few good theories as to why). This meant that they didn't take evacuation warnings seriously.
The poor have a harder time missing days of work than those on salary; undoubtedly, some were worried about losing time if they evacuated.
The poor tend to be more passive than the middle class. That not only prevented evacuation; it probably prevented some possible self-rescues.
The poor tend to have less rich social networks, which meant fewer people looking for those who were trapped; that's the repeated lesson of heat waves in America.
The poor lack access to credit. Without credit it is hard to get a motel room; it is also hard to comply with an emergency evacuation order if it's the end of the month and you're out of cash.
The poor are the ones who mostly make up gangs, who are organized, have guns, and take very little effort to turn into a marauding mob. This is only a tiny fraction of the population, but a tiny fraction is enough to terrorize the rest.
As you can see, few of these are directly reparable by the government in any sort of reasonable time frame, and I'm not sure a lot of them are reparable at all; as far as I know, people on the dole in Europe live from check to check too. Other things, like gangs, are something the government has been fighting for some time.
But the government could have rectified this by building an evacuation plan that included:
1) Shelter for all the people without means to stay in hotels, not a small fraction of them
2) Provision for pets
3) A serious, door-to-door evacuation effort
4) Transportation to shelters from NOLA
Why didn't New Orleans do this? Some combination of cost, ignorance, and the wishful belief that something that hasn't happened yet won't happen tomorrow, I expect.
But what about Bush? I hear you cry. Look, the Bush administration undoubtedly screwed up in many ways, but as far as I can tell, none of their preventive failures would have made much difference. The majority of people are expected to have drowned because they were trapped in their attics in the relatively early hours of the flood--when there simply wouldn't have been any way for even a crackerjack FEMA effort to have rescued the majority of the dead. Once the levee broke, those people were mostly doomed. And responsibility for evacuation rests with the local government.
Now, perhaps it shouldn't. Perhaps the Feds should do that job. But those are big questions of federalism--and I think that Mickey Kaus is right that this disaster has shown one of the major weaknesses of federalist government, though I also agree with a colleague that there's simply no other way to organize a country as big as the US. And given the fact that the administration was apparently prevented from deploying some troops because of jurisdictional clashes with the Louisiana governor after Katrina struck, it seems unlikely that the administration would have managed to secure such powers before the disaster that showed how badly it was needed.
But I also think there's a wishful tone to the belief among many liberals that this all could have been prevented had only a Democrat been in charge. Exhibit one for this is the mendacious charge that Bush somehow cut funding to levee building efforts that would have prevented this. Exhibit two is the more plausible assertion that FEMA was better under Clinton. But I'm not quite sure how we know it was better. We had one major disaster under Clinton, Northridge, in which local services remained intact, communications were fine, and most of the rescues seem to have been performed by private citizens at the site. What we may have just learned is that when it's needed, as it was in 1992 and 2005, FEMA doesn't do a very good job. And if that's so, there are deep systemic problems having to do with the bureaucratic and legislative structure of the US government that will not be changed by changing the party affiliation of the five guys at the top of the pyramid. Yet no one's really looking at changing the system that broke down--only at changing out some of the cogs in the machine.
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