The more I read about the chaos that is Louisiana these days, the more I realise that my previous post only begins to scratch the surface of the institutional problem. One of the readers at Harry's place makes an excellent point:
The point, as seen from a European perspective, is not whose fault the whole dreadful hurricane business was, but that its aftermath took on such awful proportions. I (in the UK) follow the news regularly both in English and German, and not just on one broadcaster/ print medium. It is simply wrong to claim, as some in America appear to be doing, that the broadcasters/journalists to a man are all anti-American. They are not. The question that remains to baffle us is why on earth it took so long for anything to be done. The facts are incontrovertible, tens of thousands of people were left in the most appalling conditions, the forces of law and order collapsed, and this in the most powerful nation on earth, and one which regularly chides others for inefficiency. No one really cares whether or not the Mayor of New Orleans, or the governor of this state or that had 24 or 48 hours, or whether… waffle, waffle, waffle.
The point is that nothing was done in a country that regularly berates rest of the world for it many failings. America always has, so it claims, the better solution to this or that problem. Do things the American way, we are told, and all will be well.
The way I see, the US government is no more immune to bureaucratic cockups, turf-fighting etc. than any other one. And I am absolutely positve that the US government is as hobbled by its own idiotic regulations as any other one. But I do not believe that the US government is actually worse than any other one.
I would be interested, though I fear horrified, to see the results of a similarly powerful hurricane/typhoon on (to pick a place not at all at random) Hong Kong, Shenzen and the surrounding Pearl River Delta. Hong Kong would, I suspect, survive just fine but I can practically guarantee that it would be witness to death and destruction across the internal border on a horrific scale. I also predict that the disaster of Shenzen would be denied by the Chinese government and they would refuse all offers of assistence with claims that everything was under control. Said claims being comprehensively disproven some six months later when shortages of stuff made in Shenzen would be obvious in shops around the world.
Likewise, although I think it unreasonable to speculate about hurricanes, if the French Riviera ever suffers a major (say magnitude 6.5+) earthquake - the Riviera is undoubtedly a seismically active area so this is plausible - it will be utterly fascinating for outsiders to see the total collapse of infrastructure that I expect to occur. A good 6.x magnitude quake is likely to take out the main road and railway links to both Italy and the rest of France as well as causing landslides and building collapses all over the place and probably demonstrating the lack of resilience of the large amounts of landfill used for critical things such as Nice Airport. I have no doubt that Sarko would be bustling around decreeing this and that but I would be surprised to see more aid than a couple of helicopters arriving in less than a week simply because the logistics challenge would be so significent.
I started writing some examples of the logistics problem but fortunately before I could post them I found that Jason at Iraqnow has far betterones. This logisitcs issue is one reason why top down government doesn't work because the top down model assumes that the all wise and all powerful government will have stocks of stuff plus fuel to transport them near but not in the disaster zone and that therefore the population doesn't need to prepare anymore than the government tells it to. A bottom up solution - what one might call the Mormon solution - on the other hand gives every household its own stock of emergency supplies, enough to last 3-4 days, plus a solar power charger, water purifier etc., gives each community some emergency blankets, tents, medical supplies, rescue equipment and fuel and so on. That way when disaster happens most of the required stuff is already there no matter where there happens to be. Of course this may assume that no one steals the stored stuff, but the household level of supply is fairly simply done by an annual provision organized by the local community and within the household it seems unlikely to be stolen. Moreover when disaster strikes it immediately becomes clear who skimped, pilfered etc. and who didn't and since most probably will not it limits the amount of stuff that has to be brought in.
There may, however, be an even more insidious problem in that trust in the government results in less individual common sense with regards to residence. The facts about New Orleans, that it was below sea-level, in a hurricane zone and at the bottom of one of the longest rivers in the world, were not exactly secret and those are the sorts of facts which would make it less than attractive as a place to live under most rational calculations, yet despite that it remained full of people. Indeed not only full of people but many of its inhabitents seemed unwilling to take the initiative in trying to leave. I suspect that one reason for that was the belief that the government's spending on levees, pumps etc. would protect it from disaster. In fact of course such a belief was misplaced, just as the similar belief of those living in the upriver Mississippi/Misouri flood zones was misplace in the 1990s. Governments cannot in fact beat nature head on even though politicians and bureacrats like to think they can if given enough money but every storm that nearly overtops the levee lulls the population and their leaders into a further false sense of security. The fact that some of the civic authorities in the region seem to be both corrupt and incompetent is merely further evidence to he point that big government doesn't work, because big top down government gives big funds to people to manage and that provides the incentive for some people to divert them. Sure some people will be corrupt and pilfer a $100 account that they have control over but in general the larger the sum of money the greater the incentive to steal some or all of it.
There is undoubtedly a related problem here, which is that successful disaster management means no headlines. If you look at the generally good disaster management on display in Japan or Florida over the last year or five (and the resulting lack of "Massive hurricane/typhoon/earthquake X million people basically unharmed" headlines) then you see that this is not well reported. Right now typhoon 14 is hammering Western Japan with masses of water (some part reported about 1 meter of rain - compare that to the 8 inches that caused major trouble in New Orleans 10 years ago), there are floods all over the place, a handful of people are dead and a few thousand have been evacuated from their homes. But even the Japanese TV news (I can watch NHK on satellite) spends as much time on the Hurricane Katrina clean up as it does on its own typhoon. This is a problem because the world could usefully learn from the Japanese approach (and I know it still has top down problems witness the article I linked to yesterday) and from seeing how the Japanese, on the whole, work bottom up with each community taking care of its own.
Some big, top down, governments are more effective than others - Louisiana is probably about as bad as it gets in the USA, and that is, on the whole, far more effective than the government in places like Haiti, Sri Lanka or Russia - but the point is surely clear - governments cannot react effectively in a top down fashion. We know that one of the strengths of the US military compared to most others is the way that it expects low-ranking officers and NCOs to take the initiative. Fighting a natural disaster is something where the same tactics apply. We should expect smart governments to use them.