Slate Outdoes Onion Once Again

What the hell is this? From Slate - one Steven Landsburg writes about how disaster relief encourages people to live in dangerous places. He sets up a cute little model - a "fable" - in which people choose between living in a dangerous city and a safer city - he complains that disaster relief encourages people to live in dangerous places. That, in the absence of disaster relief, people would not live in New Orleans or San Francisco.

Part of the comedy is built on one of the points in his model - that given identical cities, one subject to earthquakes and one not - hosing prices (say) will be cheaper in the one subject to earthquakes. ("Otherwise, nobody would live there.") Now true - he's cheating by imagining these 2 identical cities - and real cities are not identical - but still. There's great comedy inherent in imagining that San Francisco, for instance, has cheap housing.

He hems and haws about his model, but what the model really does is eliminate the underlying reason why there are cities in flood planes and next to volcanos and on fault lines in the first place. New Orleans is a Port - an ocean port that connects to the third largest river n the world, a river, furthermore, that connects one of the most fertile plains of the world to the ocean. That is far more important in why there is a city there than any federal disaster relief. Likewise San Francisco. Have you ever been to San Francisco? Did you notice the deep harbor? Did you notice the proximity to superb agricultural areas? Even the climate, Mark Twain notwithstanding - compared to New Orleans? Compared to Buffalo?

Cities stand in these places because places like New Orleans and San Francisco (and Los Angeles, for that matter, or Tokyo or Naples or most other large cities in disaster prone locations) offer the things civilization needs - access to water, to fertile lands, accessible from other places. I wish people whining about disaster relief or why people would live in a drained swamp 10 feet below sea level in hurricane country would just spend 10 minutes looking at a fucking map, and then shut up and send some money to the Red Cross.

(The title, of course, is a gloss on the Onion's coverage of the hurricane. Which, while not up to their post 9/11 coverage, is predictably sharp, funny and, for the most part, true. "White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters". Yep.)