Tag Archives: Earthquake

The irony

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This from today’s Wall Street Journal editorial:

After a once-in-300-years earthquake, the Japanese have been keeping cool amid the chaos, organizing an enormous relief and rescue operation, and generally earning the world’s admiration. We wish we could say the same for the reaction in the U.S., where the troubles at Japan’s nuclear reactors have produced an overreaction about the risks of modern life and technology.

Part of the problem is the lack of media proportion about the disaster itself. The quake and tsunami have killed hundreds, and probably thousands, with tens of billions of dollars in damage.

This from today’s Wall Street Journal main website page:

Now, I’m no nuclear Luddite.  But with many things I’ve learned to be skeptical, especially of what we don’t know.  The benefits of nuclear power are great.  The costs can be too.

More on the Chilean Earthquake

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Don Boudreaux gives more specifics on why some countries are richer than others in his post at Cafe Hayek on Property and Safety Rights.

This is key:

In Chile, property rights are secure; in Haiti they are not.

No one will invest the skilled engineering, advanced materials, and other costly resources required to construct and maintain a building meant to last if that building might be taken from its owner tomorrow.

Security in our property is a key ingredient to wealth.  It underpins many of the decisions we make daily, but we don’t give it much thought, or worse, we take it for granted that what’s your’s is your’s and what’s mine is mine.

How different would your decisions be if you didn’t feel secure in your property?

  • Where would you keep your savings if you couldn’t trust a banker?
  • Would you buy a home if someone could just take it from you?
  • Would a lender loan you money to buy a home if they couldn’t get clear title to property in case you couldn’t pay your debt?
  • Would you be willing to write a book, invest in your education, star in a movie, save for retirement, build shelter, buy a flat screen TV, by two weeks of groceries or do any of things that you do that helps make your life better if someone could simply take the fruits of these things by force and without remuneration?

The answer is no.

You might try it once, or twice.  But, after getting shafted a few times, you’d keep a low profile and live around the sustenance level.

The reason you’d do this isn’t because your lazy.  It’s that you’d find this to be the optimal level of existence for the risk, reward and safety.

Haiti and Chile Earthquakes

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Don Boudreaux of George Mason University and blog Cafe Hayek sums up well the difference in safety between the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile in his letter to the Washington Post.  Here’s a snippet:

With a market-oriented economy, per-capita income in Chile is more than ten times higher than is per-capita income in Haiti.  One result is that Chileans demand and can afford better-constructed buildings – buildings designed by more-skilled architects, made of stronger materials, and erected (and maintained) by better-trained and more highly specialized workers.

Chile has – and enforces – tough building codes because it can afford them.  Building codes of equal stringency in Haiti would be dead letters because Haitians simply cannot afford the level of safety that Chileans now enjoy.

Well put.  Many people I speak with understand that Haiti is poor.  They don’t seem to consider why.